Managing Programming for CEOs is a great thing to read. My cheeks turned red when I read some of the comments (translate: lame excuses) programmers can use. So true!
“It’ll be done ASAP.”
Translation: There is no schedule yet.
“That feature shouldn’t add any time to the schedule.”
Translation: There is no schedule yet.
“It’s fifty percent done.”
Translation: It hasn’t been started yet.
“It can literally do anything you want it do.”
Translation: There is no spec yet.
“Take my word for it, my group isn’t on the critical path.”
Translation: It’s schedule-chicken time. We’re way late but someone else is bound to be even later.
“It’s ninety percent done.”
Translation: The remaining ten percent will take ninety percent of the elapsed time.
“It’s ninety-five percent done,”
Translation: The remaining five percent will take ninety-five percent of the elapsed time.
“It’s code complete.”
Translation: Some code has been written. Features will be added later.
“The code is 95% reusable.”
Translation: Five percent of the source code is utterly and irretrievably lost.
“It’s feature complete.”
Translation: The feature list has been truncated.
“The UI’s still a little bit rough.”
Translation: What’s not to love about the A:> prompt?
“I’ve got an idea for a really cool feature. It’ll blow you away.”
Translation: Please give me an excuse to blow the schedule away.
“It’s Alpha ready.”
Translation: A lot of code has been written; none tested.
“It’s Beta ready.”
Translation: It’s Alpha ready.”
“The daily bug count is going down.”
Translation: The testers have been reassigned or The testers have had their email server removed.
“What? You wanted the results to display? On the screen? That’s gonna be hard.”
Translation: Here’s a good place to bury all the slippage. Major schedule revision coming.
“Ship it!”
Translation: The Development team is sick of this and wants to move on to something else. The customers will test it.
Read Part 2 and Part 3 too