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"...It is our belief that over the 30 plus years of commercial computing has developed a series of sophisticated political games that have become a replacement

"...It is our belief that over the 30 plus years of commercial computing has developed a series of sophisticated political games that have become a replacement for estimation as a formal process..." If there was a planning process that was consistently reliable for new, complex software I think people would use it. And I think the adoption of agile methodologies in software development is an example of people trying to implement an improved planning process. Still, there is a lot of uncertainty. So people negotiate, incentivize, and test conviction.. I guess that is what the author means by politics. Those same games happen in most complcated transactions and relationships. I think some programmers think this stuff happens to them because they are deeply misunderstood. But it happens to building contractors, real estate agents, lawyers, etc. too.

asgard1024 12y ago
> If there was a planning process that was consistently reliable for new, complex software I think people would use it. And I think the adoption of agile methodologies in software development is an example of people trying to implement an improved planning process. There are such processes. But they require understanding of the problem, which takes time. I am not sure "agile" is really attempt at an improved planning process, it's at best not doing planning and just marching onto the problem, seeing what happens at regular intervals in the hope of better understanding it, and at worst, things like "planning poker" where you put a bunch of people into a room and let everybody make a (possibly educated but usually not very much) guess from the top of their heads.