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Sunday, April 29, 2007

Why do we keep making the same mistakes?

"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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Development Catharsis :: Copyright 2006 Mário Romano