Flav wrote on Aug 25
th, 2015 at 12:22pm:
It's not just games.... It's everywhere...
Nowaday most of the industry is like that...
It's not finished, it doesn't matter, just ship it so that we can get paid, and it appears on this quarter excel sheet...
We will finish it through after sale support...
It's a pretty depressing state of the industry when you look at it.
The "me too" approach doesn't cut it in my book.
And it's not limited to IT anymore either.
Even Defence projects have the same approach; ie. functional = finished. Commissioning and maintenance will sort out the wrinkles.
They're even inventing new terms to avoid "bugs/errors/faults", because they have negative connotations.
It's all driven by the new paradigm of professional project mgmt giving the illusion of getting things done on time on budget.
Because personal $ are at stake, corners are cut to ensure bonuses are made with someone else left to firstly "find the mess" and then to "cleanup the mess" left by these Proj Mgmt "guns/gurus/dickheads" (choose your preferred term).
The best approach is a realistic budget, milestones and release date.
However well intentioned the project mgr is, the powers that be (eg. publisher etc) has their own view of what is expected and will force that upon the process. This is where things go wrong.
Publisher: "But the last project did it in 12 weeks"
PM: "yes, but this is a different project with different scope and different resources."
Publisher: "So 12 weeks it is then!"
The current recycled fad is called "timeboxing" and its great in theory, but applied inappropriately it is disastrous. This is what I see at Turdbine with the 3 mth release schedule. Scope becomes variable, but time becomes fixed. Do what you can in the time, screw the rest, move on. The only problem is that approach is creating a legacy on unresolved problems and the DDO team does not have the resources to address those issues in "post prodn".