Control is Not Important

 

To understand control’s real role [in software development], you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects:

  • Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.
  • Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.

What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value?

— Tom DeMarco, “Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?”, IEEE Software, July/August 2009

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