Software Management

Case 1: Overtime

Background Questions

1. What might cause any communication problem that this team has?

2. What was Don s team doing?

3. What did the team do when they got behind schedule?

Don Smith made his way past the first few dozen cubicles of the zone called Software Engineering according to the sign hanging from the ceiling. He finally reached the area where his small team of five was located. Actually, the team was larger than five, but some members were at another site on the West Coast. Sam, senior engineer on Don s team, was already on the network connection, busily coding on the big computer out there.

One thing the two sites had in common was that they were producers of development tools for the huge complement of coders in the company. The particular thing Don and his team worked on was a set of small procedures based on a Unix toolset in a book. Essentially, they were coding the book.

The project was in trouble: meeting with the Quality Assurance engineer who would be doing the testing revealed how far they were from turning the product over to him. It was Don s first project, and the amount of work done off site threw his estimates into disarray.

The question was: how to regain the schedule? All were already working as fast as they could. Was it possible to make an extra hour or so per day a requirement?

Don weighed the options in detail: six weeks of overtime versus extending the delivery date. He realized that schedule slips were likely to be blamed on him. He decided that overtime was better, as he had never heard of anyone being blamed for that .

After giving a rousing we are the only thing acting as an obstacle to increased productivity speech, the team worked 50 to 60 hours a week for the next six weeks. The software was never used. Don got another team.

Tasks  

1. What was the real problem in this case? Could it have been avoided? How, or why not?

2. What was the impact of Don s decision on the other workers?

Case 2: Schedule

Background Questions

1. Who was Norma?

2. When one part of a plant goes on strike, what happens to the other parts ?

3. Why did the project get off schedule?

Carol Pantene drove into the big parking lot next to the assembly building. She found a spot, and walked across the road to the modernistic building that housed her team. The first floor of the Tempest-compliant structure was given over to highly classified projects. She was on the second floor. There were many cubicles on that floor, some as a rest area for engineers on a classified project in the non-air-conditioned, brutally hot hangars. One cubicle was bigger than the others were. It was occupied by Norma, the head of the project.

Norma had a single vanity: she was really proud of her schedule. She ought to be: after nearly three years , they were less than a week off. Carol had never been on such an on-time project.

The next morning, as Carol drove over a rise just south of the plant, she saw cars stretching along toward the entrances to all the parking lots. When she finally (after four hours) got to the head of the line, she saw people wearing signs. She could only make out Machinists on Strike. That was enough. She figured out that the people blocking the way were some of thousands of striking machinists whose contract had run out. During the last machinists strike, Carol and the other engineers were unaffected, as their biggest competitor s machinists went on strike. Since her company and its competitor were the last corporations left in the country that produced the artifacts in question, machinists first struck one, then the other, trading off on each contract, so as to not bring the industry to a complete halt. The affected company, left without any income, eventually settled the strike, and the working machinists at the other company quickly voted to accept the same terms.

Carol was nearly five hours late for work. She arrived just in time for upper management to send her and the other engineers home. Norma had lost a day on her schedule.

The next morning, the line was a little shorter. When she got to the head of it, only two strikers were at the entrance to the car park. Management had obtained a restraining order the night before, limiting the strikers to two persons at each entrance . The strikers were walking across the road like guards , so, for only a few seconds on each crossing they were far enough apart to enable an engineer s car to pass without running them down. The flow inbound was jerky but steady. She was only three hours late this time. Others were there ahead of her, but some came in during the next hour. Between late arrivals, and general disruption, Norma lost another day.

The next morning, the line was almost as long as the first day, but it did not seem to be moving. As she neared the level approach to the plant, some people waved their arms for her to stop her car. Apparently, some enterprising young machinist had filled his pickup truck s bed with roofing nails . These had been spread on the approach road during the night. Cars further down the road had four flat tires. Obviously, no one got in that morning. Norma s team lost another day.

Over the three weeks of the strike, about a week was wasted , doubling Norma s scheduling error. She was upset.

Tasks  

1. What was the nature of the strike risk (where did it come from)?

2. What could Norma have done to mitigate the strike risk?

3. How did the strike affect the project work?

Case 3: Getting New Business

Background Questions

1. How did the team devise the original estimate do its job?

2. Why did the senior managers change the schedule?

Mike Culpepper sat hunched down, trying to be invisible near the back of the auditorium. At the front were managers well above his pay grade. It was obvious that his company had to diversify. For 40 years they built big airplanes, but now no or few big airplanes would be bought. They had decided to move into the tactical airplane business, something that they had not built for nearly 50 years. This would be the first contract on which they would bid in the new arena.

Mike and his coworkers had concentrated on a Request for Proposal (RFP) to upgrade existing but no longer manufactured tactical airplanes for a state national guard. Knowing how important this was for the company, his team spent much care with the estimates and especially the bottom line. This day was a review of their plans before shipping the proposal to the customer.

The Grand Pooh-Bahs sat near the front, took everything in, and then, after Mike s team was done, announced, We can t win at this price, and detailed a new figure. They won the contract as low bidders.

The team estimated the number of workers needed for each phase of the development cycle. Since they were using something that looked like the waterfall model, they expected to start small, ramp up, and go back to being small as the deadline approached. The new price meant that the height of ramping up was now less than before. This meant fewer workers at key times. All was all right in the first phases. When the team entered code and test, being shorthanded started to hurt. As they went along, the number of engineers assigned to them got even smaller. The managers claimed that the extra help had worked too long on the project, and was no longer part of the budget.

Mike s team reacted by beginning to slip milestones. One by one, people were being transferred according to the original schedule. Slowly the team s cubicles emptied out, until only Mike remained for the last touches on the software. He delivered it two years late.

Tasks  

1. Whose fault is it that the project was late?

2. How could lateness been avoided?

3. Should Mike s team have taken the contract?

Case 4: Discovering Information

Background Questions

1. What was the army of accountants trying to calculate?

2. Is this information useful to software development teams ? Why, or why not?

John Nunez was taking a shortcut using the administrative building added to the government-built plant. He was going back to his cubicle office after checking on some assemblies. It was toward the end of the day.

John crossed the open -space work area (all desks, without walls). He walked his normal engineer thinking walk: hands clasped behind his back, head down. As he passed one desk, the words lines of code leapt at him. He scrambled back to the desk, startling its owner. What John found amazed him.

Each engineer filled out a card every day. This was done so the company knew how much to charge the government. They entered lines of code produced and time. Thus, they had an idea of personal productivity.

Here, the accounting clerk separated and summed the data by contract number, thus deriving the corporate productivity. How long have you been doing this? John asked. For years, the accountant replied.

John remembered his boss moving from her old cubicle to a new one, carefully cradling copies of all her written estimates on every previous project. He thought about how much real data by project would have helped her. He also thought about how much real data for all the projects would have helped the company.

Tasks  

1. What risk does a lack of real data cause?

2. Is there a way to address this with the accounting data?

3. What do you think of a big company acting this way?