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.

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