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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?
> Except that "new development" and "maintenance" are just labels. As long as there are no new user visible features (apart from improved speed and smaller memory footprint) all development is "maintenance"
Nonsense like this is why we don't allow idiots like you to check in new code without process and code review. You're the mechanic who says "hey, I didn't touch your paint job, it doesn't matter that I replaced your speakers and replaced your battery, drained the air conditioner fluid, and replaced your generator with 3 gerbils in a habitrail".