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My wife is turning into my project manager . . .
Me : Check out this game I'm building as a side project!
Wife : Wow that's really neat! I expect to be able to play it on my phone. 1 month?
Me: What? I haven't even learned how to port ...
Wife : (interrupts) ONE MONTH
Scope creep even at home *sigh13 -
Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...
In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.
And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence15 -
Boss: "I know we just finished the first part of Client A's project but they also want this extra work done that wasn't in the contract."
Me: "Can't do it without pushing back Client B's work"
Boss: "Well we don't want that. We need to hit that deadline."
Me: "Cool"
Boss: "But Client A was really hoping this new feature which wasn't in the scope would be in."
Me: "Then we're pushing back Client B's work"
<<loop continues >>5 -
A guide to estimations.
1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.
2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.
2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.
3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.
4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes
5) calculate time
6) now give an educated estimate.
7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.
8) if scope creep occurs: goto:15 -
!rant
The Sound of Typing (an original dev parody of "The Sound of Silence")
Hello caffeine, my old friend
I've come to sip on you again
Because my mind continues sleeping
While overpiled work is creeping
And the deadline that is flashing upon my screen
Can't be unseen
Within the sound of typing
Down the lines of buggy code
I quickly switch to debug mode
What kind of moron wrote this function?
For this unnecessary junction?
Wrapped in a condition that will always return true
I need a brew
To forget the sound of typing
Boss said I you do not know
WordPress like a cancer grows
A one page website doesn't need that
Still I wear my debug hard hat
And when I sleep I still see the same terror
Fatal error
Echoed in the sounds of typing
And every time I leave my home
I must launch chrome on my phone
The constant messages and phone calls
The chiming echoes through the halls
While I frantically fix some FooBar'd CSS
BUT I don't have LESS
Deep in the sounds of typing
And when I think I have it done
Some scope creep ruins all my fun
So now I force through an all-nighter
While I forge on like a fighter
But the project I thought was due on next Friday
Changed to Monday
Within the sound of typing9 -
When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.
Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".
What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.
Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.
Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.
I did this for 4 months.
The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.
So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.
I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.
In the end:
- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.
- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job
- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.
So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.
3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.2 -
Project manager: We have 13weeks for this project. We have promised the client.
Me: okay, why wasnt I consulted on that commitment?
Project Manager: yeah.... we have to do it
Me: okay, if we have 2 dedicated backend and one full time frontend - ONLY on this project.
Project manager: (with the face of lies) yes yes sure we can do that.
6 weeks later, after continuous interruptions. Frontend is behind because he was only on the project to an amount of 2 weeks of the 6 weeks.
Project manager: Are we still on time?
Me: *looks around for prank cameras* no the f#*k we not
Project manager: can we put in weekends?
Me: its 2019 bro, that ain't happening
*But because I am a nice guy, and dont like taking Ls, we will have it ready. Just not gonna tell the project manager, he deserves a few sleepless nights *7 -
Get assigned ticket.
Finish the most of the feature. Finish most of the specs.
Push.
Second dev wants to own accounting half of the ticket.
Rip out half my changes, rewrite specs.
Push.
Code review asks for minor changes.
Finish them.
Push.
Product creep creeps the scope.
Finish the feature again.
Push.
Product creep creep-creeps the scope.
Finish the feature again.
Push.
New release happens.
Merge in master; fix conflicts. Run specs; random unrelated specs fail, some fail intermittently. Rabbit holes of complicated, unexplored, obviously-flawed code.
Fuck that. Push.7 -
Adios Motherfucker!
Finally got that pile of misery finished. That simple ticket exploded in complexity and had quite a bit of scope creep. So so glad it's over. I mean, apart from code review and QA. But still. It's done!
Also: I may have been drinking already. Clearly not enough from the painful lack of typos and silliness. Gonna go work on that.6 -
This is a somewhat old story. I joined a project in making a 2.5d platformer in Unity. A couple months in, the project manager had decided that this game would have two sequels, an MMORPG, a live-action movie and a web series. He informed the whole team of this decision. One week later, every member of the dev team had left. This scope crept forth from the depths of hell and ruined a simple project. Lesson learned: Keep the scope small and don't bite over more than you can chew.
Edit: I know that you should dream big, but don't make 4 games, a web series and a movie simultaneously.3 -
FUCK YOU BUSINESS GUY
FUCK YOUR SCOPE CREEP
SOLO DEV AINT GIVING U 20 FEATURES IN ONE MOTHERFUCKING WEEK
Seriously, though. Being a solo full-stackq developer who can do both frontend (react, redux) and backend (feathers, node) does NOT mean you have twice the manpower to accomplish all of your shitty shit. Just because you have an idea does NOT mean I have to implement all of it. You don't even have a motherfucking specifications for me, yet you expect me to deliver shitloads of complete fucking feature in a fucking week. This is not a fucking joke. I am NOT your mother fucking tool. I need time to build my stack, design and perfect the interface. I don't want a shitty motherfucking product on my fucking portfolio.
*dies inside*
11 -
Hey remember that edge case we told you about months ago and you said ya "don't worry, it's an edge case" ya, we just found the edge and sailed right off it
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Hertz the car rental company wanted a new website. They hired accenture. Accenture did allegedly a poor job. The site did not come with responsiveness, not with web components and 2 years over deadline. Hertz sues Accenture for $38+ million.
Scope creep deluxe?9 -
Work out the major requirements,
Identify platform(s) and environment best suited to project,
Design and develop around core features,
Allow 6-12 weeks for scope creep and the additional BS features,
Build, test and deploy in a week or two to meet unattainable deadlines.
Spend new couple of months refactoring and fixing everything. -
TLDR: Scope creep.
Fuck it! I hate scope creep! 2 days before the deadline is due, slip in a little scope creep to bolster your already ambiguous as fuck scope! Of course, more fool me for taking on a project with a scope as ambiguous as this one. Or for accepting the 'just do x and y and your done' as gospel. But then again I enjoy paying my bills and you know, eating from time to time!
Fuck 'em! Fuck Clients! Fuck Scope Creep! Fuck Ambiguity to it's very Fucking core! Fuck it! Fuck me! Fuck code! I'm venturing under my table for a little cry and a sulk, then back at the god-damned grindstone to finish the project and all it's creepy scopy bits before the deadline tomorrow! FUCK!2 -
I've just about finished 100% of the scoped features of a quick little app. The client is demanding that I add more features at his whim before he'll pay me anything. Mind you, this is a small project, and I have a day job that pays me loads more than he's paying me. Oh, and the client has no control over the github repo or any of the deployed environments.
4 -
Laying cozy on sofa, watching yt from phone. Decide there's a need for a bigger screen but too cozy to adjust position to watch from TV. Grab trusty old chromebook running Debian from arm's reach instead. Haven't used that thing in a while. Try to connect bt headphones. Notice that the Bluetooth module is not detected according to the UI. Weird, never noticed that. Wonder what that's about. Apparently someone had fixed it in kernel already long ago, I'm on a much newer kernel. Too lazy to pick up wired headphones from across the room. Maybe I'll update the firmware, I haven't done that in a while. Oh, the script doesn't run because it requires newer glibc. Wait, I'm still on Debian 11, maybe it would be worth it to upgrade to 12. Wow, upgrading Debian is a surprisingly manual process. Wonder what I'll be doing tonight. Wait, what was I doing again?13
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Me when after a client has signed a spec document and they still try to add more features. Cannot find words to explain how much I hate scope creep.
2 -
Beware of scope creep. If it's a bug, fix it for free. If it's a new feature or changed from the original signed off scope, charge for it.1
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Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.
Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.
And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.
But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.
Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.
Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.
And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.
In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!12 -
Best:
- survived 2020 and all its woes.
RIP those that didn't.
- delivered a major project this year that felt like it never wanted to end.
Scope creep.... nope, scope realignment kills the soul.
- hired a competent dev!!! 🥳 Not being a SoloDev is a weird feeling!
- pay rise during a pandemic, that was a nice touch.
Worst:
- dealt with several useless contractors and ended up redoing most of the work myself.
- don't lie to me when you say you *can* do something, only to throw yourself into a complex rabbit hole you can't dig yourself out of.
- major project took 500% longer then originally scoped - it was only meant to be a tight 6 weeks, not an excruciating never ending list of changes and rebuilds 🤯
good thing I get paid regardless - but I don't think the burnout was worth the while.
2021:
- let's see what the world has on offer to try and burn me out of existence this time! -
Manager keeps fucking changing the requirements on me.
All day yesterday I couldn't even do any programming because I was so fucking tired. It wasn't until 2 pm and physically removing myself from my office that I finally could think about the problem I was having and move on. I was seriously really annoyed with myself and annoyed that scope creep keeps fucking up my shit.1 -
PTSD flashbacks of the 🤡s wanting us to change every subscription price less than 24 hours before a major release that would be the live version after we aired on national television...
management at its best folks. remember, your time doesn't matter, only theirs, it's way more "important"
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡3 -
Is scope creep worse when the Client does it or when internal departments do it to you?
Right now I can't fucking tell. ( :/ )3 -
"Here's the sprint, it's well defined. fullstackchris, can you do this in two weeks?"
"Hmmm... nice work, looks well defined. It'll be tough, but sure, I can do it two weeks!"
Two days before sprint ends:
"Can we quickly duplicate n number of features from apps with literal armies of devs like whatsapp, airbnb, and Instagram?!?!?! We NEED these features to be polished and work perfectly!"
Scope creep will be my ONLY feedback in this retro.2 -
So me and some colleagues joined a hackathon. We already agreed on our project architecture, UI design, and features to build and showcase. Halfway through development new features kept getting added without my inputs, I said to myself it's ok maybe they're just small insertions. But nope, they kept breaking my CSS and UI design and kept causing merge issues on our repo because, well, no one could seem to agree on the project scope. The last straw was, with a couple of hours left, someone went and added new screens and changed the application flow entirely, which entailed some rather nasty rework of my code to fix. Fuck that, I decided to just stop and let them sort the mess.
When it was our turn to present our project, the fucking cunts assumed I would do all the talking - even if they never sent over the slides they put together. Why the fuck am I going to present something drastically different from the initial, agreed-upon scope? I told them to do it themselves and I remained silent throughout the entire debacle.
Of course, we lost. But I wasn't surprised. The guys who presented kept on contradicting each other and were not unified in their vision. I'm never teaming up with them ever again. Fucking asshole douchebag fucks. -
A little background on project fubar:
Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.
That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.
I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.
Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.
Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.
I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?2 -
Oof, scope creep
Come back to an 8 month old project and I can't update the website because something in webpack needs something in python to compile... Um why. Literally just a poster with some images and a markdown parser.
So I spent 5 hours and 850 lines of code later modernizing the code and... I have the same website again but now it compiles. Woo? -
Just happened today!
So since this morning we've been trying to get our website ready for UAT deployment Monday next week, even though we only were told of it yesterday. Since we had some critical merge conflicts to unscrew on our dev branch for promoting to UAT, we sent a warning to everyone on our hipchat group
Dev team: @all please don't commit anything to the repo for an hour or so while we get the branch good for dev and uat build
Tech lead: ok
That should be enough warning, right? Surely our tech lead, who has been piling up our scope creep trying to please our stakeholders, understands well enough not to do a single goddamn thing on our repo until we sort it out, right?
Nope.
10 minutes later our tech lead pushes several changes that not only break our builds but also remove all our configuration transformations. I just stormed out of the office to avoid sending her on a one-way ticket to slapsville and fuckyoutown. Geez goddamn louise. -
Scope creep.
Stopping scope creep when it rears its goddamn ugly head.
I kinda want project managers to recite "The Riflemans Creed" but replace rifle with the project scope. So they realize how important sticking to that scope is.
"This is my project. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My scope is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my projects' scope is useless. Without the project scope, I am useless...." -
Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.
A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.
In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.
These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.
The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.
Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.
When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.
After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.
This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it. -
I love and embrace hurdles but I suppose getting people to understand and adhere to locked down requirements. I have seen lots of moving targets and scope creep impact projects and ultimately business success.
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Working for a large client converting paper forms to the web. Stated goals, simplify data entry for clients, improve data quality, reduce resourcing in backend human processing.
We met to review prototype and discuss workflow questions. Crazy deadlines, with the usual changing scope creep.
We start to point out the need for data validation, to shorten # of questions based on answers.
Business says no. All forms should be submittable regardless of what user enters, don’t put validations in because all that warning messaging confuses them and takes up more time.
Web form should behave like the paper copy....
Welcome to 1975!!! This is why 2018 won’t be like 2018...1 -
Anyone at the Junior level coming from a UX and Front End mixed background get frustrated while applying to jobs furthering learning new libraries while circling around to software or CMS's they haven't used in months/years? Feels like a scope creep IRL.
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I literally spent a week fighting scope creep instinctively introduced by myself on a submodule with the nominal role *Read all files the compiler needs to read using the fewest possible additional steps*
I have to keep reminding myself that there's no such thing as a scope too narrow. If its purpose can be described without spelling out the implementation, it can be encapsulated. -
Scope creep is the worst, and it's always last minute which causes bugs, which causes unhappy scope creeping clients.. :-/
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Anyone ever stay on a set of projects they knew were going to fail? I got pulled off of 3 major projects to help another team that was failing at their very high visibility project. I got that back on track, but then they needed to keep me on for stabilization work and to onboard some folks. Then they still kept me on and my projects all suffered. I was very vocal to management about my concerns. Finally, management recognized that my projects weren’t getting done so now I’m back on them. The thing is, now it’s probably too late and I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail to meet deadlines on all three (plus there’s scope creep of course). I want to just walk away from this hell hole, but I’ve made some promises to folks that helped me get the job that I wouldn’t be a job hopper (been here 4 years, and each year is worse than the last). I think I’m just going to do the best I can and see what happens - and try not to have a heart attack in the process.1
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Whenever I go out for a walk now, I get a monologue in my head about everything wrong with my team... But using managerial terms like man-month, velocity, chaotic, context switching costs, lack of processes and standards, need for more slack, too much low value busy work, technical debt, scope creep, (violation of) the two-pizza rule... by a lot7
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Scope creep is so great. I love it when someone wants to add something to a request that has nothing to do with the request, and will only be used MAYBE once annually. /s1
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There needs to be a new (MOOC) class for people like me.
Hi, I'm William. I can't get my head around designing systems. I've read GoF and a few breakdowns of it as well. I find some patterns obvious for my field of interest (game dev, woot!) while I'm reading through the stuff, but have a pretty hard time retaining much of it. I'm aware of the danger of over using patterns, so I don't worry that much about it. I'll look something up when I'm sure I need it.
Still, I'm tired of the tutorial blues. I can watch a few different people write entire games, usually not in the language of choice, but that only helps me so much.
How do I fight scope creep? In the meantime, how can I make things extensible? Scope does need to creep some, after all.
People joke about starting with (visual) BASIC ruining you forever. I don't believe in that crap, but is this just denial? Am I too dumb for this? Not that I'd ever seriously blame a language for that.
I've been a hobbyist for well over 10 years, please don't make me count exactly how long I've been unsuccessful.
I'm baffled by Löve. I think it's the coolest shit I've seen, maybe ever (unless we're counting IPFS).
I think what really prompted this rant, apart from the obvious degradation of my mental health, was my search for an entity component system for Löve/Lua. Hold your replies. I know there's a few of them, and I'm positive that they're fantastic. I'd roll my own, but that requires actual Lua specific knowledge that I just haven't dug all that deep into yet. I can't wrap my head around the ones that exist, even though I can tell their complexity is next to none really.
I have severe tool anxiety, I'm shocked that I've stuck with ZeroBrane Studio as long as I have. It feels good though.
Sorry to use this as "Devs Anonymous", but I think that's how this community helps (me) best.
I feel like I should stop now and just say: Advice? before this gets much deeper/less readable.
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