Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
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Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#2I've seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that's what happened here. The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#3What the author said is very true. We should accept that there is no good way to estimate the schedule because each software is inherently new. Simply that it will be done when it is done.
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#4I've seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that's what happened here. The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.
This particular entry looks more like someone just read The Mythical Man-Month and decided to write something about the philosophy of software project management afterwards.
Not that it's necessarily bad, but it is formulaic.
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#5Contrast:
"You mean you didn't have a complete design for that bridge before you started building it??"
"You mean you waterfall designed and implemented your YC app project??"
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#6"""
it's likely that adapting old code to a new context is less work than starting from square one again.
"""
It has been measured that changing more than 25% of software incurs more than 100% of the cost. So your mileage may vary.
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#7Contrast: "You mean you didn't have a complete design for that bridge before you started building it??" "You mean you waterfall designed and implemented your YC app project??"
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Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#8""" it's likely that adapting old code to a new context is less work than starting from square one again. """ It has been measured that changing more than 25% of software incurs more than 100% of the cost. So your mileage may vary.
Any chance you remember where that measurement came from? I could use that with a client right now, given we're discussing a major refactor of about 25%-30% of the code base.
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#9True for some projects, not true at all for many others. If you build e-commerce online stores, or other standard sorts of offerings, you may very well be able to "lay the bricks" in a very predictable amount of time after you've done a few.
Re: Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability
#10I've seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that's what happened here. The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.
I'm the author of the gist. The submitter is a good friend of mine that felt like posting it, and I don't mind.
It was a reply I made to another friend and previous co-worker on twitter a while back that was talking about software estimation. It wasn't a comment on any other blog post or hackernews story.
I was thinking I should edit and elaborate on it into a full blog post at some point, but that would also require setting up a blog ;P I didn't take the time to write this up to the standards of an adversarial blog aggregation audience. And I don't care to defend it as such or in detail. It's meant to outline a broad point I think is true, but not to be ironclad in it's argument.
Anyhow, no cherry picking or anything unethical going on here.