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Invasor
Moderator
Posts: 7638
Location: On the road
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 Posted: Sun, 3rd Jan 2016 16:37 Post subject: The sad graph of software death |
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| Quote: | 
This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool.
In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses -- you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don't do an especially good job of communicating with one another.
When this problem becomes severe enough or persists long enough, you end up with the sad graph of death shown above. And what the graph tells us is that both backlog length and issue resolution time are trending towards infinity. Even if the team is able to respond some small number of issues quickly, the fact remains that most will take a very long time to be resolved if they get worked on at all, and that situation will get worse over time unless something changes.
In the best case scenario, an open/close graph that looks like the one I've shown in this email is more of a sign of messy project management practices than it is of imminent doom. There might be lots of old tickets that were actually fixed but never closed, or a ton of duplicate issues that are artificially inflating the total count. Or in the "packrat project manager" scenario, there may be tons of low priority nice-to-have tickets that have been sitting around for months or years, even though everyone knows they'll never be worked on any time soon. If this is the case, the graph is still "sad", but it's not a death spiral... it's just a sign of a wasteful and broken issue tracking process.
However, in my case, I built this graph because the company I was helping was going through major struggles. If you look around and everything is on fire and your application seems to be about to collapse into the sea AND you produce a graph like this from your tracker, it's a sign of a real problem that needs to be dealt with right away.
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http://tinyletter.com/programming-beyond-practices/letters/the-sad-graph-of-software-death
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| Posted: Sun, 3rd Jan 2016 16:58 Post subject: |
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welcome to software development
this should be shown to students
"this is what you have to look forward to - learn to live in denial now"
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