Practical programmer: an embarrassing, yet rewarding, ending to a previous column
Robert Lee Glass · Communications of the ACM · 2001
The author's repeat visit as a consultant to a software company made him realize that what seemed so obvious the first time, suddenly seemed less so in the second visit. After the first visit, the author took the position that schedule pressure was the undoing of the software world and that no amount of classic software engineering including the software Engineering Institute or Capability Maturity Model had the power to undo that. He recommended some organizational changes be made. He made a second visit as a follow-up to the recommendations he made on his first visit, and found that there had been profound changes due to his recommendations of instituting better process and about instituting inspections. For all the good things that happened between the first and second consulting visits, the improvements were beginning to turn bad again as schedule pressure did not abate. He opines that vigilance against the "schedule oppression" must be ongoing and if people rest on their laurels after the first round of success, they are going to be in trouble all over again. He realizes that process, people and technology don't directly attack the problem but if used properly, can attack it in more subtle ways.