Fred’s Laws – How not to write software

This begins a series of posts on Fred’s Laws – basically a set of anti-rules on how not to develop software.

Over the past twenty-odd years, I have seen a lot of software projects crash and burn. Many have been doomed from the start, while many others died slow, painful deaths after hopeful beginnings. Some have finished, and the systems are in production, without ever having realized that the project was a failure. Others should have failed, but managed to struggle through due to the heroic efforts of one or more dedicated (and usually really smart) people.

I have also seen more than a few “failed” projects that were technical successes. We built really cool software. We were on time, on budget, and had good quality. They failed in some other aspect – usually they were business failures for one reason or another.

The environments in which these projects have died have been varied as well. Some tried to make it with no process at all. Some had lots and lots and lots (and lots and lots) of process. I have not seen a great deal of correlation between process and success (well, except that the process I pick for my projects is always successful 😉 ).

When I look back on these catastrophic projects, usually I can see where things went wrong. In fact, most of the time I could see where they were going wrong while it was happening, like watching a car crash in slow motion, but was frequently powerless to avoid the impact. More often than not (in fact, I would be willing to say always), the root cause was something completely avoidable (from a technical or project perspective). Never was it because we chose Windows over Linux (or vice versa), nor because of the programming language we chose, nor because what we set out to do was technically impossible.

As I have written Fred’s Laws (well, written them in my head, none of them are actually written yet!) it occurs to me that they all seem to be straight from the department of the bloody obvious. No rocket science here. If they are this obvious, why even write them down. Well, the reason is that, despite how really obvious all of this is, I watch projects not do them all the time. Most of the time, in fact.

So, stay tuned. I am going to try to post one law per day (or so) until I run out of ideas.

BTW, as a little footnote, I have been involved in a few successful projects along the way. It just always seems to be the ones that failed (and failed spectacularly) that stick out in my memory.