Why Your Software Project Is Failing

An anonymous reader writes: At OSCON this year, Red Hat's Tom Callaway gave a talk entitled "This is Why You Fail: The Avoidable Mistakes Open Source Projects STILL Make." In 2009, Callaway was starting to work on the Chromium project—and to say it wasn't a pleasant experience was the biggest understatement Callaway made in his talk. Callaway said he likes challenges, but he felt buried by the project, and reached a point where he thought he should just quit his work. (Callaway said it's important to note that Chromium's code is not bad code; it's just a lot of code and a lot of code that Google didn't write.) This was making Callaway really frustrated, and people wanted to know what was upsetting him. Callaway wanted to be able to better explain his frustration, so he crafted this list which he called his "Points of Fail."

Comments

Slashdot summary, as usual, misses the point

[Idarubicin]

If we're going to talk about Callaway's Points of Fail, and create a link in the Slashdot summary that *looks* like it takes you to that list, then perhaps there should actually be a link to the list.

Callaway's original Points of Fail blog post.

You know, instead of the usual Slashdot way of pointing to an article wrapper that talks briefly about some of the points and then eventually links to the real list.

Correct link to TRA

[Demonoid-Penguin]

His list, instead of the link to a blog with an article about the list. That blog post is interesting - though the picture of the author scratching is just weird. Was that taken at a lice convention?

Re: a little more proof reading please

[Nidi62]

In Slashdot's defense, I've seen much more glaring errors on actual journalist sites such as CNN. So it is a growing trend, not just here.

Re:the usual suspects apply.

[phantomfive]

hmm? In one paragraph you say 'shut up and hack' and in the next you criticize Poettering for doing exactly that?

Specifically, he criticized Poettering for not taking care of features he'd created.