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Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development?

Posted by Soulskill on from the sunk-cost-fallacy-is-a-thing dept.

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?

12 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Wow... by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is FDD here to stay?

    It seems like you're extrapolating from that experience, to thinking "FDD" is a current trend. AFAIK it's not. A small number of dysfunctional shops like that has virtually always existed. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've only been doing software development for a few years, so you're working from a limited sample size.

    I have been in a few jobs where the managers were verbally and/or emotionally abusive. In both cases I left ASAP.

    1. Re:Wow... by MadKeithV · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A small number of dysfunctional shops like that has virtually always existed.

      90% is a small number, right?

      I'm joking, I've never had to work in a truly dysfunctional shop, and yet "fear-driven development" tends to make an appearance whenever stress levels get higher. Pressure makes people take funny decisions that they think are "safe", such as not touching a legacy code base for another 5 years because "it works and we don't want to break it", until it finally collapses under its own weight and technological advancement (in the case I'm thinking of it was the lack of multithreading and 64bit support).

      Often its the fear of other people's reactions if you stick your neck out and get it wrong that will doom you to inaction. It helps to remind yourself and others constantly that you cannot have improvement without change, and the only way to do nothing wrong is to do nothing. Build up trust at detecting and *recovering* from mistakes is at least as important as having a process that avoids mistakes. Mistakes happen. Learn to deal with them instead of expending inordinate amounts of time trying to avoid them.

  2. Fear of changing code.... by justaguy516 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [2] is a very common problem, not just because of a badly written code-base, but mostly (IMHO) because of people not having the time to understand a complex piece of code. Ends up in 'nearly' the same code being written in a dozen different places. In my knowledge, it doesn't immediately screw things up, but, over time as the garbage accumulates leads to extremely interesting failure scenarios.

    1. Re:Fear of changing code.... by jonwil · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have also seen/heard of circumstances where "doing the minimum to keep the thing working" is allowed but actually improving the code is not because improving the code counts as "new work" and comes from a different budget than maintanence.
      Seems stupid but that's how some shops operate.

    2. Re:Fear of changing code.... by MadKeithV · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have also seen/heard of circumstances where "doing the minimum to keep the thing working" is allowed but actually improving the code is not because improving the code counts as "new work" and comes from a different budget than maintenance. Seems stupid but that's how some shops operate.

      "The minimum to keep the thing working" nearly always implies improving the code. All developers need to realize this and stop this silly false dichotomy between "maintenance" and "refactoring".

  3. 3rd world by goarilla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The only thing I will say is that emerging economies need Unions !
    This machiavellian style of management is akin to slave labor.

  4. What does fear driven development lead to? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:What does fear driven development lead to? by SomeoneFromBelgium · · Score: 5, Funny

      The dark side of the source they are...
      Once you go down that development path, forever will it dominate your release destiny.

  5. Well by jaredm1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Caveat: I speak as a developer, just recently I've been told I should be doing more project management / team leading / mentoring. Everytime I ask a developer how long a piece of code will take I get an answer that I know is ridiculously unrealistic. Most non-techie Project Managers would take a developers 'I can do that in an afternoon' at face value. Instead I've had to have long discussions with my guys so that they begin to think in a way that gives accurate estimates (i.e. accounting for a bit of 'I don't know why this isn't working' and accounting for the fact they may have to refactor a bits of code here and there to make it tidier, etc.). So, now that I'm been on the 'other side' I do understand how estimates can go haywire.

  6. Depends on which country by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    90% is a small number, right?

    TFA talked about a company in South East Asia and I do have business dealings with companies from that region - and I can tell you that many companies from that region are indeed dysfunctional

    They kinda adopt the Western approach of management, but then they add in their own cultural flavor, mainly based on race / religion / language background and when all those things got mixed up, what TFA mentioned wasn't even enough to scratch the surface of the true dysfunctional nature of the beasts down there

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
  7. Seriously? This is a post? by bfwebster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not to pile on here, but there is nothing new or recent about fear-driven projects of any kind, much less fear-driven IT projects. All you need to do is read some of the classic books on IT project management, including The Psychology of Computer Programming by Jerry Weinberg (1971), The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks (1975), and Death March by Ed Yourdon (1997).

    Back in the early 90s, I was chief software architect for a start-up developing a large, complex and novel commercial software product. After working long hours for years, we had missed our original release date and were struggling to come up with a new date that we could be sure of making. Top management (CEO, CFO) was considering carrot/stick "incentives" to "motivate" the engineering team to make a certain date; one of the senior developers stopped me in a hallway by the engineering offices and asked, "Don't they realize they're dealing with grown-ups back here?"

    P.S. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I remain appalled at the profound lack of familiarity among far too many IT industry practitioners of the essential books on software engineering and IT project management. As I have said ad infinitum and ad nauseum, not only do they keep re-inventing the wheel, they keep reinventing the flat tire.

    --
    Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
  8. Re:Free market by Princeofcups · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If employees stay while working 18-hour/day, 6 day/week, it's because they are unable to find a better job.

    That's called blaming the victim.

    --
    The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.