Fortunately, the developers in my company are pretty good about coding to the specification requirements, and not adding or removing things on a whim. We have more trouble with this when we work with outside vendors – their developers have been more prone to do this. Recently we made requests to many of our vendors that we don’t want to work with certain developers that have a history of this type of thing, so hopefully that should help.

What amazes me, and is completely inexcusable is why all of this was masked until 2 days before code freeze. Something has to be done to fix this and reprimand the team from keeping secrets, or else this will result in chaos and you will never have predictability, or the ability to ever control your own product. (been there, really really sux so much that I had to find another job)

The decision of what features to include and not needs to be a thoughtful, deliberate exercise. It can’t be left to the arbitrary whims of a midnight coder who doesn’t know/care about the customer problems, the market environment, the competive offerings, etc.

Further, out of respect for the customers, it is just plain WRONG to remove a key, beloved feature without giving them advanced notice, explaining why the feature will be cut and how to work around its absence. Notifying them two days before a release ain’t going to cut it.

And of course, WHO do you think is going to have the fun job of telling the customers their feature was dropped last second or handling the irrate masses? The Lead Developer who caused this situation? No way – he’s too busy ‘refactoring’ some other piece of code somewhere. Instead, The Cranky Product Manager gets to be the whipping boy/grrl on this one.

Or something like that.

BTW: Holograms are cool, don’t knock ‘em.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
“Learn How Product Managers Can Be Successful And Get The Respect That They Deserve”

The CPM meant the Palin “Well I’ll try to find some and bring em to ya!” to be the punchline of the post. Why? Because that type of weak response is so typical when people have no clue or no good explanation for what they did when THEIR freakin’ JOB is to know it. So, the Lead Dev’s response was similar in the CPM’s mind.

The CPM would have felt the same about that answer if Biden or Obama or said it. It was the weakness of Palin’s response that the CPM found funny (and depressing), NOT what the true answer to Couric’s question would be.

Anyway, for this joke work (which clearly it didn’t, but whatever), the CPM had to let people know what the heck she was alluding to. And thus, she felt she had to preface it with the Katie Couric question about McCain’s reg/dereg votes.

Believe it or not, the CPM does not have a firm opinion on how good or bad McCain’s track record in the reg/dereg area is. The whole point was to give context for the joke.

Clearly, the joke didn’t work. And even if it did for some people, the CPM’s long-winded explanation right here is gonna kill it.

Rest assured, political-related humor is unlikely to appear in this blog again for at least a long time. The CPM just had to get the last little bit out of her system. Blame it on post election trauma disorder (PEST).

More than the one big one that little Katie Couric dismissed and Palin leaned on, here are two more they didn’t know…

I don’t do policy research so there could be more, just web search…

From here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/18/AR2008091803159.html

However, when it comes to regulating financial institutions and corporate misconduct, Mr. McCain’s record is more in keeping with his current rhetoric. In the aftermath of the Enron collapse and other accounting scandals, he was a leader, with Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), in pushing to require that companies treat stock options granted to employees as expenses on their balance sheets. “I have long opposed unnecessary regulation of business activity, mindful that the heavy hand of government can discourage innovation,” he wrote in a July 2002 op-ed in the New York Times. “But in the current climate only a restoration of the system of checks and balances that once protected the American investor — and that has seriously deteriorated over the past 10 years — can restore the confidence that makes financial markets work.”

Mr. McCain was an early voice calling for the resignation of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, charging that he “seems to prefer industry self-policing to necessary lawmaking. Government’s demands for corporate accountability are only credible if government executives are held accountable as well.”

In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — while Mr. Obama was notably silent. “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole,” Mr. McCain warned at the time.

If somebody claims that they had to cancel a party because they needed to spend a week tidying, then you would know they were lying. When it gets that large, it’s not tidying, it’s removing the evidence that they spent years living like a pig. If they had actually been tidying all along, there would be no problem, no canceling the party.

Similarly, if somebody said that they were just doing a bit of tidying in your living room and whoops, they took out three load bearing walls, then the right answer isn’t, “Oh, tidying is good, I guess that’s fine.” It’s to grab them firmly by their earlobe and shout, “You did what?”

So, CPM readers, if an engineer uses the word “refactor” in a way that you can’t substitute “tidy”, beat them like a rug. And if you’re shy, let me do it, as that’s a word I want to keep valuable.