The fourteen stages of any real software project Posted by bert hubert on 11/16/2008 Idea - estimates for time to completion range from 3 days to 3 weeks Pretty convincing first stab ‘look how cool this would be’ The Hard Slog to get something that actually works. Estimates now range from 3 months to 3 years. First real users pop up, discovery is made that all assumptions were off Starts to look good to the first real user Elation! Someone actually uses the code it for real, the bugs come out in droves A zillion bugs get addressed, harsh words are spoken Elation! The guy you had previously told that 100 million users would not ‘in principle’ be a problem actually took your word for it, and deployed it on said user base. Harsh words are spoken. Fundamentals are reviewed, large fractions of the code base reworked Product now actually does what everybody hoped it would do. Even very unlikely bugs have cropped up by now, and have been addressed. Even rare use cases are now taken into account. If a user complains of a crash at this stage, you can voice doubts about the quality of his hardware or operating system.
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