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Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development?
nerdyalien writes: A few years back, I worked for a large-scale web development project in southeast Asia. Despite formally adopting Agile/Scrum, development was driven based on fear imposed by managers. Scott Hanselman defines Fear-Driven-Development as having three parts. 1) Organizational fear has "worried about making mistakes, breaking the build, or causing bugs that the organization increases focus on making paper, creating excessive process, and effectively standing in the way of writing code." 2) There's also fear of changing code, which comes from a complex, poorly-understood, or unmaintainable codebase. 3) The most common one is fear of losing your job, which can lead to developers checking in barely-functioning code and managers committing to a death march rather than admit failure. My project ran four times its initial estimation, and included horrendous 18-hour/day, 6 day/week crunches with pizza dinners. Is FDD here to stay?
Fear driven development leads to anger driven development. Anger driven development leads to hate driven development. Hate driven development leads to buffering (and security defects).
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
One of the best laughs of the week was when you managed to talk with a straight face about complicated projects being understood well enough. Most peop0le would have lost it after describing such a made up scenario, but you managed to keep going with what looks like perfect seriousness.