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 ...