30. 10.
Apesar de discordar com alguma freqüência de certas opiniões de Joel Spolsky , dessa vez não posso deixar de admitir que ele foi muito feliz ao citar os motivos pelos quais simplesmente acrescentar horas de trabalho a um projeto de desenvolvimento de software não o torna bem sucedido. Apenas quem já trabalhou na área sabe como funcionam os fluxos de inspiração que fazem um desenvolvedor render mais em cinco ou seis horas do que em uma semana seguida escrevendo (ou tentando escrever) código até tarde.
There’s a whole body of literature establishing that working more hours doesn’t produce software any faster. Edward Yourdon, the software entrepreneur and author, dubbed this kind of project the "death march."
Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.
Compelling them to spend even more hours sitting in front of a computer won’t really translate into more output–or if it does, it will be the wrong kind of output. When their brains are completely fried, software developers are almost certainly going to do more damage than good, writing unusable code and introducing bugs galore. And if you do ban the Internet and multiplayer games to force them to keep writing code past their natural bedtimes, well, they’ll probably start quitting on you. Running a death march is not the only way to make a project late and a budget buster. But it is a surefire way to do so.
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Tags: desenvolvimento, peopleware, software
Rodrigo Amaral