For “Presley“…may where he ended have mercy on his tortured soul…
So I was working as the EBusiness Development Manager at this medium-sized insurance place in Des Moines. We had several projects failing in other areas, and we were affected by some of their pain. But one, in particular, stuck out. We were partners with Callidus to use their agent commissions/compensation system called TrueProducer. My team’s part on the project was very small - we essentially needed to hook our E-Contracting up to Callidus’ web service layer (or so we thought). So I grab my team lead “Joe”, and my analyst “Jane”, and we sit with the Callidus team and our agency group in a meeting about this very subject. After a demo of some poorly written software, we grilled them on capabilities for E-Contracting. Since their head engineer on this project answered our questions correctly, we were relieved and headed back to await the green light.
Weeks later, we get the green light. So we ask where their API/WSDLs are, just like any normal development group would. The response from Callidus’ point person was “Um…web services? We’ll have to get back to you.” So they get back to us and now we’re talking flat files since they won’t have the web services they said they had until 2009 (or later). Oh yeah, and we found out that the legal contract they signed that stated SQL Server 2005 and it was hosted in our shop, basically meant to say Oracle and Callidus’ll host it.
So after hours and hours of meeting with out Agency Support team, I assign my Contract-To-Hire, “Presley”, to this initiative. I figured that the agreed-upon solution just needed to modify existing E-Contracting screens to render a PDF file that could be entered by hand into Callidus. Not the most automated or efficient, but it would do.
So throughout the duration of this seemingly neverending project, “Presley” grew more and more frustrated. Finally I inquired into why. Now, understand that “Presley” and I share a similar sense of humor and I had been his beating post for his frustrations, but rather than share the individual experiences, he concocted the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) pretty accurately for having only been with us for 4 months. I wanted to share it with you:
- Gather requirements
- Gather more requirements
- Assign Project
- Begin coding
- Change requirements before any useful code has been written and do not tell the developer
- Keep coding with a confused but happy look on your face
- Change requirements again, this time eliminating an entire requirement that has already been coded
- Keep coding with a straight face
- Change requirements and also add some new requirements
- Keep coding still with nobody having seen the code
- Create a new task with other additions to the same code that has not yet been seen or approved.
- Keep coding, but much slower and in disbelief that a place functions like this
- Add more items to a task and say it’s the final list of items to work on.
- Keep coding but do a lot more internet surfing since you realize this crap isn’t going to end well
- Add more items to the list which you just said was final for the second time but mark it as TBD
- Stop coding because you’re just pissed off
- BA Asks developer how progress is coming on the task where half of the original items are crossed out and some items still are marked TBD
- Testers ask the developer how testing is going.
- Developer is so confused he looks for a new job and give up working on the project.
- BA thinks project is still coming along nicely even though no coding has been done for the task as it is listed now.
- Developer’s supervisor quits in disgust nobody cares but his team
- Developers leave one by one
- Company keeps running with idiots at the wheel
- Life goes on
