On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 16:49 +0530, kenneth gonsalves wrote:
I have had
only 3 experiences in developing prop, and all ended up in my being
booted out fairly early in the process, so I am not sure if my
observations are accurate. The cycle as I see it is like this:
1. Sales meets the clients and promises them anything under the sun,
fix
a price and get an agreement and an advance. After that sales is out
of
the picture.
2. Design then meets the clients and draw up an elaborate set of specs
and get the client's approval. After that, design is out of the
picture.
3. The design is then sent to production. The job is parceled out to
several teams, each team working in isolation from the other teams. I
will not go into how these teams operate, but the general atmosphere
is
- if it works, it is fine and peer review and criticism of another's
code is seen as a deadly insult. Obviously a lot of the code is
duplicated as no team knows what the other teams are doing, and, no
one
will anyway admit that another person's solution is better than his.
Note that the teams do not have any contact with the clients. When the
teams finish their assignments, most of the members move on to other
projects leaving a skeleton team to cope with the next stage.
4. Now the integration team moves in. They are the elite and highly
paid
and their job is to somehow get everything to work together. They do a
lot of reverse engineering and 'adjustments' and finally pronounce
themselves satisfied.
5. Then testing takes over - all tests are with simulated data and
with
the help of the integrators the tests are pronounced done.
6. The product is then dumped on the hapless client and he is left to
the tender mercies of support. In the period of development, a lot of
his needs have changed and he needs many things he has not contracted
for. Also with real data, many bugs appear. Some clients decide to
live
with it - others go to another vendor, and the same process starts
again. The client very often spends more to get the whole thing
working
in some fashion or the other than on the original application.