How To Make Software Projects Fail

Bob Abooey writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has an interesting interview of Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. Joel, a former programmer at Microsoft, discusses some of the reasons he thinks some very popular software companies or projects fail, including Netscape, Lotus 123, Borland, etc." This interview brings out some mild boiler-room stories which sound like they could be the basis of a good book, along the lines of Soul of a New Machine .

How to make projects fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can spend most of your time reading /.

oh, and FP!!!

How To Make Software Projects Fail:

[Skyshadow]

Step 1: Hire my boss (God, please hire him away!).
Step 2: Put him in charge of software development.
Step 3: Do nothing as priorities change weekly and deadlines slip away.
Step 4: Do nothing to stem exodus of clued-in employees to less-screwed companies.
Step 5: Force remaining employees to work 15 hour days. Provide subtle reminders that there's a recession out there.
Step 6: Do nothing as even non-clued-in employees flee.
Step 7: Hire a sweatshop in China to crank out code; present this sound like a good idea.

There, that was pretty easy. And, to be honest, everything beyond Step 1 pretty much happens on its own.

why are we listening to this guy?

[deander2]

Hold on, this man worked at Microsoft from 1991 to 1994. He led the Excel team. He led the VB team. This was win16. Excel is great now, but do you remember how much it sucked before office 95? And who the heck used VB for 3.1?

Even better! he wrote the Juno e-mail application. Believe me, this was no fine engineering here. Why does he know better then anyone other Tom, Dick or Harry what makes software project tick?

This is easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just hire an open source advocate to finish do the project. It will no doubt fail miserably. As an analogy, look at how Linus messed up Transmeta.

This is a troll for those that don't get it.

Re:Good point

[jdcook]

I couldn't agree more. In a similar vein, I removed the turn signals from my car. I get .0000047% improved performance and, after all, what good are signals? I know where I'm going.

Strange obsession

[ScottMaxwell]

Quoting from the article:

[Netscape] had to sit on their hands while Microsoft completely ate their lunch.

... dBase for Windows [...] took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch.

... Microsoft ate Ashton-Tate's word processing lunch.

Maybe they should interview him again when he's not so hungry.

Re:Good point

[thePfhitz]

Plus, why assume that someone who writes bad code will write good comments?

Haven't you heard the quote, "Comments in code are like sex - even when it's bad, it's still better than nothing"?

If you don't need them, then great... but it's the other people working on the same project that would be the ones using comments placed in the code to help themselves along.

Re:And just how much software have YOU designed?

[achurch]

Given your opinion on commenting, it shows that have almost zero real world experience. Lord save me from l33t people like you who think they know it all.

Given your opinion on commenting, it shows that have almost zero real world experience. Lord save me from l33t people like you who think they know it all.

Re:How To Make Software Projects Fail:

[DataSquid]

Ah, the true sign of a clueless boss: A non-AC post about how clueless your boss is, with no fear he'll read /. and find it ;)

Re:Good point

[Andy_R]

It's very important that the poorly written code is documented, since that's the code that will need to be re-written!

Re:Chars and bytes arrays are both the wrong solut

[Anonymous Coward]

The right solution is not Unicode either.
How would you get a single code point for a character which is in the surrogate pair region?

Since CityDesk is written in VB6 (rigorous documentation has never been it's strong point), then one wonders why FogCreek didn't use the Unicode-aware AscW function, rather than the ASCII Asc function.

This leads us nicely to the people who wrote the documentation for VB6. Well, VB6 is based originally on VBA1, from around 1992. This originated from the MS Excel team, of which the program manager responsible for VBA was.....yes...jspolsky who wrote the original VBA spec from which the documentation was produced.

Re:Good point

[mccalli]

...after all, what good are signals? I know where I'm going.

Ah ha - a Mercedes driver...

Cheers,
Ian