First page Back Continue Last page Graphics

Summary of pilot project


Notes:

This part of the story has a happy ending: the project was delivered to specification, on time and according to the cost estimates.

Throughout the project the developers were confident of what they were being asked to produce, and that they were producing it to a good standard.

QA was involved in the review meetings throughout the project and had a clear view of what to expect and when. They were even more impressed with the software delivered to them – it didn't crash and burn. Ever!

The project manager had a clear idea of what work was completed and what was outstanding. Only one package (which we'd hijacked from an earlier project) needed repeated fixing.

I mentioned a project manager earlier who had't been convinced by my arguments for unit tests. She visited the project room the day before the customer system went live and was instantly converted!

She expected the normal "all hands to the pumps" panic – every available developer struggling to fix class A bugs, QA standing by to check the latest release, the project manager "hand holding" on the customer site.

What she found was almost all the programmers had been released to other projects, the project manager was quietly preparing a tender for a further project, the system architect was on holiday, I was consulting on another project, and the remaining two developers were working through the first batch of change requests (which had't been signed off by the customer – but we had to find some work for them).

She was so impressed by this that she sought me out to tell me about it.