Planning to fail is planning to fail

Embedded software developers are a gloomy crowd. #Forrester #embeddedsoftware

This is fundamentally flawed. The flaw is that I have seen very few companies that PLAN a project. They put together "project plans" but they haven't planned the project. They just take a wing at what they think they can do and call that a plan. Often the plan includes make-or-break constraints that are put there by someone that has no clue (we have to have this in six months, or our effort is wasted, failure is not an option). Let's face it. Planning is hard work and largely unproductive. What it really does for us is set expectations and allows us to prepare. And it allows us to choose intelligently. But, it can't be done in a half hour by a group sitting around a table. You need to research the requirements, estimate the needs and the uncertainties. It can then be assembled by that group, but it almost always is unacceptably long and expensive, so it gets arbitrarily cu...

Full article: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/food-for-thought...