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On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 01:56:54PM +1000, Rowling, Jill wrote:
> Systems Engineering used to be a compulsory subject at both UNSW EE/CS and
> UTS EE; clearly it isn't compulsory everywhere!
> Unfortunately most small businesses (includes many telcos, computer game
> developers and some dot-com survivors) are unaware that the cost of a
> project is inversely proportional to the effort put into the initial
> specification, and just cannot understand the leap from small projects to
> large projects.
It isn't necessarily anything to do with the INITIAL specification.
Everything starts life as small (in the commercial world anyhow) and
small projects don't need much initial specification and that is probably
a GOOD thing because otherwise the small projects will not get off the
ground at all.
I've worked at the military side of things and they are the complete
opposite, they believe in MASSIVE specifications. The problem is that
because the massive specification is written up front (before anyone
really knew what they were doing or why) it is guaranteed to be wrong.
Everyone knows that the specification is guaranteed to be wrong so they
try to build contingency into it for expansion and that makes it even
bigger. Later on in the project, the pain of changing anything that
might break the specification is so great that there is no room to
get in there are actually make the stuff work.
Getting back to the point at hand, the real issue is that as a project
gets older, at some stage a specification must get written and the
project architecture (whatever that might be) needs to be documented.
It is probably a great idea NOT to try and do this up-front, or if you
do it up-front then don't try too hard to make it correct and always
be willing to go back and admit you were wrong (because you will be).
On the other hand, it is a terrible idea to try and not do it at all,
and that's where so many people make their mistake. The attitude is,
"I got started without a design document, therefore I never will need one".
When it gets to that stage there is a serious problem. A design document
is part of the overall system documentation and it has to grow along
with the rest of the project.
The other problem (deeper than all the others) is that companies hire
managers based on how they dress, who they drink with, who they sleep
with, who they went to school with and a host of other parameters
up to and totally excluding what they know about the tasks that they
are supposedly managing. There is a belief in a "generic manager" who
can manage any task simply by juggling numbers in a spreadsheet and
does not require any task-specific knowledge whatsoever. Convenient
though this belief is, it is demonstrably wrong. This belief has
probably caused more pain and suffering than all the terrorists
on earth.
> The usual result is they cease to be in business after a while.
Well you only have to look at Microsoft to see where selling high
quality software can get you :-)
- Tel ( http://bespoke.homelinux.net/ )
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