“One of the basic premises of evolution is that traits that are
advantageous to the species are perpetuated and adverse ones
winnowed. Extending the metaphor to project management (and
specifically as it is applied to software design), you would expect
that modern ‘best practices’ would be the ones that had resulted in
the most benefit to companies, attracting new ‘mates’ (projects).
Conversely, practices that had a negative impact on project
delivery should have been evolutionarily discarded, unable to find
new projects to breed with.“Unfortunately, exactly the opposite seems to be occurring in
project management. Each year brings new metrics to measure
against, new design tools to learn and code against, and new
reporting structures designed to bring more ‘control’ to the
process. And this would all be well and good, if they actually
helped. But in reality, all that the morass of design methodologies
and time management techniques is doing is turning software
development into a ponderous, uninspired, and uncertain
venture…”