"Why do we keep making the same mistakes, when there are so many new mistakes to try out?", someone once said. And here it is an old list of the same old mistakes, as Steven McConnell wrote them back on 1996:
| People-Related Mistakes |
| 1. Undermined motivation 2. Weak personnel 3. Uncontrolled problem employees 4. Heroics 5. Adding people to a late project 6. Noisy, crowded offices 7. Friction between developers and customers 8. Unrealistic expectations 9. Lack of effective project sponsorship 10. Lack of stakeholder buy-in 11. Lack of user input 12. Politics placed over substance 13. Wishful thinking |
| Process-Related Mistakes |
| 14. Overly optimistic schedules 16. Insufficient risk management 17. Contractor failure Insufficient planning 18. Abandonment of planning under pressure 19. Wasted time during the fuzzy front end 20. Shortchanged upstream activities 21. Inadequate design 22. Shortchanged quality assurance 23. Insufficient management controls 24. Premature or too frequent convergence 25. Omitting necessary tasks from estimates 26. Planning to catch up later 27. Code-like-hell programming |
| Product-Related Mistakes |
| 28. Requirements gold-plating 29. Feature creep 30. Developer gold-plating 31. Push me, pull me negotiation 32. Research-oriented development |
| Technology-Related Mistakes |
| 33. Silver-bullet syndrome 34. Overestimated savings from new tools or methods 35. Switching tools in the middle of a project 36. Lack of automated source-code control |
Strange as it may be for an ever changing industry, this list seems pretty up to date. How can we explain this? Are we, the human factor, the problematic pattern? :)
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