Viewgraph Engineering
This project anti-pattern is related to the urge to get a prefect plan before execution. Thus, it is also known as Glass Case plan, Detailitis plan, or "the Perfect" plan.
Symptoms and Consequences
Symptoms and Consequences
- Glass Case Plan
- Inability to plan at a pragmatic level
- Focus on costs rather than delivery
- Enough greed to commit to any detail as long as the project is funded
- Ignorance of the status of the project development.
- Failed to deliver critical deliverable
- Detailitis Plan
- Inability to plan at a pragmatic level
- Focus on costs rather than delivery
- Spending more time planning, detailing progress, and re-planning them than on delivering software:
- Project manager plans the project's activities.
- Team leaders plan the team activities and the developers' activities.
- Each planner has to over monitor and capture progress at every level.
- Endless planning and re-planning causes further planning and re-planning.
- The objectives shifts from delivery of software to delivery set of plans.
- Continual delays to software delivery and eventual project failure.
Causes
Causes
Glass Case Plan
- Lack of a pragmatic, common-sense approach to planning, schedules, and capture the progress.
- No planning on metric capturing.
- Ignorance of basic project-management principles.
- Overzealous initial planning to attempt, and to absolute control of development.
- A sales aid for contract acquisition.
Detailitis Plan
- Overzealous continual planning to attempt, to enforce absolute control of development.
- Planning as the primary project activity.
- Forced customer compliance.
- Forced executive management compliance.
Refactor Recipes
Refactor Recipes
- Revise the deliverable plan like:
- Business requirement statement
- Technical description
- Measurable acceptance criteria
- Product usage scenarios
- Component use cases
- Plan should be supplemented with validation milestone for each component such as:
- Conceptual design approval.
- Specification design approval.
- Implementation design approval.
- Test plan approval.