Avoid Bowfinger Syndrome
I just read a great blog post about what it costs to write AAA games and the author used a term I love called "Bowfinger Syndrome". Bowfinger is a movie starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in which Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) tries to make a movie with only $2000. While a very funny movie, it hits home in the software development world in many ways.
Too often, software projects fail because folks grossly underestimate the costs associated and then spend time trying to work around the lack of budget to actually finish the project. There are a number of reasons for this and I'll give a quick list:
#1 A prototype of some software was written and someone extrapolates the costs to build the "real software". This is a mistake, prototypes are like hollywood cutout towns... they may LOOK like real software, but they don't necessarily WORK like real software. If you're eyeballing the hours necessary to build a prototype and trying to estimate effort to build the finished product, step back and imaging how you would do this if you were trying to convert a hollywood set into a real city.
#2 The costs to write an initial version of some software are buried and not really understood. This happens when domain experts or highly skilled developers write initial versions of software and then folks think that they can economize by using unskilled or domain ignorant developers to write something else or a new version of the same software. Put another way, if 1 surgeon can do 1 surgery in 1 hour, that doesn't mean 5 trained monkeys can do 5x more surgeries in the same amount of time.
#3 A contract does not mean the software can be delivered. If your business depends on software and your plan is to somehow get a lawyer to deliver it, you're not going to have a business for long. Put another way, just because someone is foolish enough to sign a contract and agree to build you a ladder to the moon, doesn't mean it's a good idea to start pre-selling tickets.
Photos:
utahstories.com
times3online.com
www.web20lawyer.com
Too often, software projects fail because folks grossly underestimate the costs associated and then spend time trying to work around the lack of budget to actually finish the project. There are a number of reasons for this and I'll give a quick list:
#1 A prototype of some software was written and someone extrapolates the costs to build the "real software". This is a mistake, prototypes are like hollywood cutout towns... they may LOOK like real software, but they don't necessarily WORK like real software. If you're eyeballing the hours necessary to build a prototype and trying to estimate effort to build the finished product, step back and imaging how you would do this if you were trying to convert a hollywood set into a real city.
#2 The costs to write an initial version of some software are buried and not really understood. This happens when domain experts or highly skilled developers write initial versions of software and then folks think that they can economize by using unskilled or domain ignorant developers to write something else or a new version of the same software. Put another way, if 1 surgeon can do 1 surgery in 1 hour, that doesn't mean 5 trained monkeys can do 5x more surgeries in the same amount of time.
#3 A contract does not mean the software can be delivered. If your business depends on software and your plan is to somehow get a lawyer to deliver it, you're not going to have a business for long. Put another way, just because someone is foolish enough to sign a contract and agree to build you a ladder to the moon, doesn't mean it's a good idea to start pre-selling tickets.
Photos:
utahstories.com
times3online.com
www.web20lawyer.com
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