[tlug] Re: OSS and getting money for it

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 > > URL?  My impression from other sources (Ed Yourdon and SEI, especially
 > > Watts Humphrey) is that the most common failure (at least in places
 > > that do formal post-mortems) is bad planning and specification, with
 > > "mission creep" being a prominent combo of the two.

 > To blame bad planning and specification is to say that the
 > participants did not understand the limitations of their ability to
 > plan and were not adequately prepared to account for changing
 > requirements, which both indicate a lack of experience.

This is true, but it's not relevant to this subthread which is about
the exchangeability of people the last time I looked.  That is, it is
a management problem, not a "loss of critical people" problem.
Experienced developers are available, you just have to pay for them.
If the project doesn't justify that expense, then you shouldn't be
doing it.

The point is not that you don't need people, or that you don't need
people of a higher quality than average.  It's that for most projects
there are plenty of people of each of the kinds you need, and they are
exchangeable with each other to a great extent within each kind, and
typically more or less exchangeable across kinds too.