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Re: Agile software development and effect on techwriting

Subject: Re: Agile software development and effect on techwriting
From: quills -at- airmail -dot- net
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 20:02:35 -0600

At 10:33 PM -0500 1/13/04, Peter wrote:

quills -at- airmail -dot- net wrote:




Oh, I worked at a place where we usually had extra time. The V.P. of Engineering told the CEO that they could put a Window overlay on our flagship product, a DOS HVAC control suite. I told my boss that it would only take a year and a half to write new, clean code for Windows.

A year and a half later, the Windows overlay (version 1.0) is released under pressure, with half the features that were available in the DOS version, and of those features, about 1/4 were buggy, didn't function as required, or were unreliable in function.
<snip>


Are they still in business?

--
Peter

Sisyphus had it easy

The company was privately held, actually competed favorably against the big HVAC controls companies (Siemens, Honeywell, etc). The CEO, after pissing away three separate technology leads, in the 10 years I worked there, didn't have the ability or the vision to take the company public, and finally sold the company to a Swedish competitor who was trying for the third time to penetrate the North American and Asia-Pacific market. They had failed in their two initial tries. The bought the company for its marketing and sales channels.

R&D stopped, the company was trying to kill the original product and sell the Swedish products. After three years, the customer base still insists on purchasing the old products, not the Swedish products which are not as open and easy to use or integrate with other company's products. They are not have a pleasant three years of it.

To top it off, the security product that we originally had integrated into the HVAC control software was basically ignored by the Swedish parent company, and this in a period where security is a very big seller!

These management groups are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

Scott



References:
RE: Agile software development and effect on techwriting: From: Gene Kim-Eng
RE: Agile software development and effect on techwriting: From: quills
Re: Agile software development and effect on techwriting: From: Peter

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