From: Steven Sinofsky To: Jeffrey Epstein -4 Subject: Fw: [New post] Learning by slipping Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 02:08:22 +0000 Importance: Normal Sent from Surface RT Check out From: Learning by Shipping Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2013 2:14 AM To: Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on Learning by Shipping Learning by slipping by Steven Sinofsky Countdown "Slipping" or missing the intended completion or milestone date of software projects is as old as software itself. There's a rich history of our industry tracking intended v. actual ship dates and speculating as to the length of the slip and the cause. Even with all this history, slipping is a complex and nuanced topic worth a bit of discussion about slipping as an engineering concept. Slipping I've certainly had my fair share of experience slipping. Projects I've worked on have run the full spectrum from landing exactly on time to slipping 20-30% from the original date. There's never a nice or positive way to look at slipping since as an engineer you're only as good as your word. So you can bet the end of every project includes a healthy amount of introspection about the slip. Big software projects are pretty unique. The biggest challenge is that large scale projects are rarely "repeated" so the ability to get better through iteration keeping some things constant is limited. This is different than building a bridge or a road where many of the steps and processes can be improvements from previous projects. In large scale software you rarely do the same thing with the same approach a second or third time. While software is everywhere, software engineering is still a very young discipline that rapidly changes. The tools and techniques are wildly different today than they were just a few years ago. Whether you think about the languages, the operating systems, or the user experience so much of what is new software today is architected and implemented in totally new