I. M. Wright podcast: “Green fields are full of maggots”

Developers, here’s the ‘pinionated podcast for I. M. Wright’s February 2009 post: “Green fields are full of maggots.” Yum!

(I. M.’s book, I. M. Wright’s Hard Code [Microsoft Press, 2007] is here.)

Wright begins like this and warms up in his second paragraph:

“As I said in Nailing the nominals, the two keys to successful big projects (100K+ LOC) are thinking ahead and defining done. Thinking ahead is about design and planning. Defining done is about setting a quality bar and sticking to it. Yet many big projects go astray even when people think ahead and define done. Why?

Often failure is due to poor executive decisions that place their own agendas above shipping. (Given you hit your quality bar, shipping is better—much better.) However, an even more frequent form of failure comes from engineering teams over thinking and over generalizing—trying to solve world hunger instead of feeding the kids in front of you.”

This is tasty too:

“Cultivating the green fields of broad ideas is not only self-serving, it's a recipe for feature-rich and value-poor products and services your customers will use begrudgingly, despise utterly, and abandon gleefully at the first opportunity.”

Two more podcasts coming next month.  Keep bouncing.

Share this post :