[tlug] Re: OSS and getting money for it

[Edward Middleton <ejdmiddleton@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Josh Glover writes:
>
>  > This is likely true in most cases, but personnel is the most common
>  > cause of failed projects.
>
> 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.
>   

It depends how you want to look at it.  Anyway, Isn't the point of a 
good post-mortem to find no-one personally responsible and decide that 
it is an inherent problem that requires no real action ;)

If you are going to put the blame on bad planning and specification you 
have to ask why this occurred.  i.e. why did the project team plan 
poorly or fail to adequately specify the problem and its solution.  This 
brings you to

1. laziness
2. the problem wasn't well defined at the project inception.
3. the requirements change as the project progressed.

How many non-trivial projects, both successful and unsuccessful, are not 
well defined at project inception and have changing requirements?  
Insufficient specification and changing requirements are pretty much a 
constant in software development  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.

Edward