Apache web server for windows - Chapter 27: Miniature Milestones ‘ CLASSIC MISTAKE Imagine
Chapter 27: Miniature Milestones ‘ CLASSIC MISTAKE Imagine that you’re a pioneer heading from the east coast to the west. Your journey is much too long to be completed in a single day, so you define a set of points that will mark the significant milestones on your journey. It’s a 2500 mile journey, so you mark five milestones, each about 500 miles apart. Major milestones 500 miles apart are great for setting long-term direction, but they are lousy for figuring out where to go each day especially when you’re traveling only, say, 25 miles per day. For that, you need finer-grain control. If you know that your big milestone is 500 miles away, north-by-northwest, you can take a compass reading, find a closer landmark that’s roughly north- by-northwest, and then strike out toward that. Once you reach that closer landmark, you take another compass reading, find another landmark, and strike out again. The close landmarks that you pick the tree, rock formation, river, or hilltop serve as your miniature milestones. Reaching the miniature milestones provides you with a steady sense of accomplishment. Since you pick only milestones that are between you and your next big milestone, reaching the miniature milestone also gives you confidence that you will eventually reach your larger objective. Miniature Milestones’ support for rapid development boils down to four factors: improved status visibility, fine-grain control, improved motivation, and reduced schedule risk. Improved status visibility. One of the most common problems on software- development projects is that neither developers, project leaders, managers, nor customers are able to assess the project’s status accurately. Say nothing about whether they can predict when the project will be done, they don’t even know how much they’ve already completed! Jim McCarthy cautions against letting a developer “go dark” (McCarthy 1995a). You believe that everything’s going along OK. Why? Because every day you ask your developers, “How’s it going?” They say, “Fine.” And then one day you ask, “How’s it going?” And they say, “Urn, we’re going to be about 6 months late.” Wow! They slipped 6 months in 1 day! How did that happen? It happened because they were “working in the dark” neither you nor they had enough light on their work to know that they had been slipping all along. With Miniature Milestones, you define a set of targets that you have to meet on a near-daily basis. If you start missing milestones, your schedule isn’t
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