Chapter 11. Stop Promising Miracles[12]

Note

Stop Promising MiraclesThis chapter was originally published in Software Development, 2000, 8(2): 49–54. It is reprinted here, with modifications, with permission of CMP Media Inc.

When I was a software developer I once received a phone call from my manager. “Got an hour?” he asked. My manager had received what seemed to be a trivial request from one of our customers. However, by the time I had understood the customer’s real need and written a small application to satisfy it, I had devoted 100 hours to this project. Not all project estimates are off by a factor of 100 but this is ...

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