A very well written post, Ovid. It summs up times I have here at work too. We're working on a payroll/HR based product, and have decided that go-live is sometime around next April. The higher-ups are reporting status to the VPs on a scale of how many "check" marks we have on the to-do list.

We all know that one thing could lead to another thing that isnt even on the "to-do" list...

My boss, whom doesnt report to the VPs, said it best: "We're measuring how close we are to completion of this road trip based apon how much gas we've used".

Another spec thing that bites me are functional specs when dealing with html. If you're supposed to code to specs, when specs havent been written you're in a bind. But when you're supposed to write said specs based apon demo/proof of concept code (think: html layout and such..) you're in a worse bind. Because the business units dont understand the difference between proof-of-conctept and final product.

Thats why projects take so long to do. The coding is a piece of cake. As long as you dont have any baggage to pull you away from your current "top priority to-do".

_14k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.