Five Pound Bag Awareness
I just felt all emotional (how geeky can it get) reading Dennis’s follw up post on Martin Fowler’s Five Pound Bag post.
There are also managers that try to get 20 pounds in the 5 pound bag. Although to me totally illogical, they seem to think that, when you place four developers on the project, they can divide the 20 pounds by four, resulting in 5 pounds. That's exactly what fits in the bag.
To my experience managers tend to add an extra pair of hands when the going gets tough. Although there are managers, though rare, with a recent background in programming who know the consequences of such an extra pair of hands. This is one of the answers to Dennis’s question: how come project managers don't follow that simple rule? Because they’re standing to far away from the actual process even while sitting in the same (team) room to notice. It’s to simple to blame only our managers for badly done planning, it’s our job to create awareness.