There's a story I heard somewhere (possibly from the
Poppendiecks?) about the Polaris submarine project.
It's usually held up to be the exemplar of a planned
project; in fact it's where PERT came from.

The story is that PERT was a Potemkin Village
kind of thing. They did it to keep the auditors and
Congress off their backs while they got the job done.

Then people actually started believing the scam...

As far as Waterfall goes, all my experience says that
an _experienced_ project manager knows how much time
to leave for hammering on the result until it behaves
(what I call Conan the Barbarian project management).
He also knows how much time to put in because the
initial requirements are never right, so he's going to
have a small tidal wave of change requests.

The big problem is that outsiders always say: "you
don't need all this slack," and cut it from the time and
resource budget. Then the project sinks.

In other words, Waterfall turns into Code and Fix
at the end.

John Roth

----- Original Message -----
From: "Simon Jones" <simon@...>
To: <extremeprogramming@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 2:45 PM
Subject: [XP] Re: The success/failure distinctions



>
> Yes. I do nearly believe that. I believe that nearly every
> successful project that claimed to be doing BDUF in fact probably
> really comes down to a bunch of people sitting down and figuring out
> what they were REALLY going to do, and then doing it.
>

I always suspected this to be the case... but never dared :)

> Ron Jeffries
> www.XProgramming.com
> There's a difference between righteous anger and just being crabby.
> --Barbara Richmond
>