Classic Mistakes in Software Development
- People-related mistakes
- Process-related mistakes
- Product-related mistakes
- Technology-related mistakes
- People
- Undermined motivation
- Weak personnel
- Uncontrolled problem employees
- Heroics
- Adding people to a late project
- Noisy, crowded offices
- Friction between developers and customers
- Unrealistic expectations
- Lack of effective project sponsorship
- Lack of stakeholder buy-in
- Lack of user input
- Politics placed over substance
- Wishful thinking
- Process
- Overly optimistic schedules
- Insufficient risk management
- Contractor failure
- Insufficient planning
- Abandonment of planning under pressure
- Wasted time during the fuzzy front end
- Short-changed upstream activities
- Inadequate design
- Insufficient management controls
- Short-changed quality assurance
- Insufficient management controls
- Premature or overly frequent convergence
- Omitting necessary tasks from estimates
- Planning to catch up later
- Code-like-hell programming
- Product
- Requirements gold-plating
- Feature creep
- Developer gold-plating
- Push-me, pull-me negotiation
- Research-oriented development
- Technology
- Silver-bullet syndrome
- Overestimated savings from new tools o methods
- Switching tools in the middle of a project
- Lack of automated source-code control
* Based on the Classic Mistakes from Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell