Our story takes place at Epsilon (not the company’s real name), a highly successful vendor of telecom billing systems. Fresh from a dot-com CTO experience, we arrive as consultants. Our task? To evaluate Epsilon’s software development team, analyze deficiencies with the legacy products and set goals for their replacement.
We’re closing the first iteration, and overall, the team is satisfied with our progress. A preliminary postmortem suggests that we’ve reached the objectives we’d set out six weeks earlier. We run the full system test suite, and after fixing several problems, know that we now possess a stable version of the system. Our developers are happy about the refactoring of the billing engine. After some teething problems, our automated build and smoke tests are running. Only one sour note sounds: The new standard interface for interprocess communications threatens to become an overly designed subsystem.
Everything’s going swimmingly, so we begin preparing for our next iteration. Unfortunately, our contentment tempts the project management gods to hurl a thunderbolt at us.
Read more at:
http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/s=821/sdm0510h/