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

  • 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

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

  • 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.