February 2009
Beginner
222 pages
5h 23m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
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Chapter 35. Scope Is the Enemy of Success
Dave Quick is the owner, chief architect, janitor, and sole employee of Thoughtful Arts. Thoughtful Arts develops off-the-shelf software for musicians and provides software design consulting for companies who develop music, or arts-oriented software.
—Dave Quick
SCOPE REFERS TO A PROJECT'S SIZE. How much time, effort, and resources? What functionality at what level of quality? How difficult to deliver? How much risk? What constraints exist? The answers define a project's scope. Software architects love the challenge of big, complicated projects. The potential rewards can even tempt people to artificially expand a project's scope to increase its apparent importance. Expanding scope is the enemy of success because the probability of failure grows faster than expected. Doubling a project's scope often increases its probability of failure by an order of magnitude.
Why does it work this way? Consider some examples:
Intuition tells us to double our time or resources to do twice as much work. History[2] says impacts are not as linear as intuition suggests. For example, a four-person team will expend more than twice the communication effort as a team of two.
Estimation is far from an exact science. Who hasn't seen features that were much harder to implement than expected?
Of course, some projects aren't worth doing without some built-in size and complexity. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.