The Code Monkey (inspired by A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe)
Take another slap upon the cheek,
While slaving on this project, week by week.
You have been wrong to work so hard,
Expecting riches and managerial regard.
Grinding out functions awake and in a dream,
Will not fetch rewards or professional esteem.
What you lack are not more lines of code,
Rather it’s architecture and a road.
To substitute quality with speed,
Is the motto of the code monkey creed.
You who seek salvation in RAD extreme
Will find, alas, a dream within a dream.
If you examine your latest stable build,
You will notice many bugs that haven’t been killed.
Strangely, they seem to grow in relation,
To your oversized code base inflation.
So many new features! How did they creep?
Through scope expansion, they trickle deep.
Building good software is hard to manifest,
If you fail the requirements to first digest.
The lesson to learn from this development ditty,
Is that no matter how clever you are or witty,
If you fudge the schedule and estimation phase,
There is but one reward for you. The death march malaise!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TnhemCEmc?rel=0]
© Copyright 2010 Yaacov Apelbaum All Rights Reserved.