On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, you wrote:
> One customer. On site. Full time. Absolute honesty. Get them on your
> side. The are the people who are *paying* for this, they deserve
> nothing but your honesty. Tell 'em about any problems and tell 'em
> early. Tell 'em about successes and tell 'em early. Get the customer
> rep onside and you have an advocated. Treat the customers like a
> mushrooms and you don't get repeat business.
sounds great ... when do we start.
Seriously XP sounds like it should work .. I read the books I was
convinced.
The only thing that occasioanlly worries me about it is that my current
client is still working his way up to being a mushroom. Apart from that
the client has a total staff of 5. I cant see them sparing 20% of their
workforce in order to sit and keep the developers comapny. Worse still I
have not yet had a decision on anything in less than 24hrs. I think that
would haold true even if they were on site too.
So I am really keen to do an XP managed project ... if it really does
work then that sfantastic, best result I could ever have. I suspect that
it fails, just in different ways to other project managment systems.
obvious ones:
The client doesn;t send Big Chief to sit with the designers, instead they
send Useless Minion. UM is positive and helpful and gives quick
decisions ona whole variety of topics. And a week later turns up with
changes handed down by Big Chief overiding those decisions. worse still
the decisions handed down make no sense because he hasn;t been with the
team and doesn;t undrstand whats going on.
Client has no concept about what software development is like and within
a week or two cancels the entire thing 'some of those guys spent a whole
week working and half the time couldnt even get it to run, by the end of
the week all they'd done was write some strange "library" code and even
that doesn;t seem to do anything'
but hey .. next person organising a XP based project that needs a junior
perl hacker .. gimme a shout ..
--
Robin Szemeti
The box said "requires windows 95 or better"
So I installed Linux!
