

The Death Star was an Agile Project - mopoke
http://greatandsmallblog.com/2011/03/07/the-death-star-was-an-agile-project/

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JoeAltmaier
I think its a perfect example of an Agile manager - anybody that isn't on
board, throw under a bus.

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parfe
The Death Star was a trap[1]. It wasn't semi-complete. It was fully
operational[2] and designed to lure in the Rebel fleet to a single location.
Destroying the rebels in detail had proved to be too time consuming.

[1] Ackbar, Return of the Jedi "It's a trap!"

[2] The Emperor, Return of the Jedi "As you can see, my young apprentice, your
friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and
OPERATIONAL battle station!"

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checoivan
Well... We all know what happed to admirals Ozzel and Mottie when they said
"no repro" and "woops, missed that" in the daily scrum with Darth Vader.

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ams6110
I'm not sure I'd hold up a project that left a fatal vulnerability exposed to
the world as a "good" example of a methodology.

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icegreentea
Article is talking about the second Death Star. They removed the 'small
thermal exhaust port' of that one. Rather it got blown up cause it was under
construction leaving a path to the core open (and the moon based shield
generator got blown up).

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jonnathanson
I'm amazed they didn't build at least _some_ redundancy into their shielding
plans. I mean, come on. They fixed the fatal flaw from the first design, but
you'd think they would have learned a more valuable lesson: it's not the
exhaust port; it's the fact that you keep leaving one critical dependency in
the plan each time.

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famousactress
No, no.. the construction was always perfect. There just wasn't an acceptance
test for that. If PM had wanted Death Star of the poking-it-there-won't-make-
it-explode variety, then they should have written a User Story for that.
_Duh_.

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Splines
Bug: Thermal exhaust port is vulnerable to external attack that can lead to
total system failure

Opened By: qa-ds1-15215

Severity: 1

Fix By: DS2

Comments:

qa-ds1-15215: I was checking out the design and noticed that thermal exhaust
port AH-51 is open to the world. Someone could drop an explosive in here and
bring down the system. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

pm-ds1-32542: Well, duh. Who in their right mind is going to be dropping
explosives into their own system? Resolution: By Design

qa-ds1-15215: Status: Activated. Are you serious? Do you not understand the
implications of this design problem?

pm-ds1-32542: Assigned To: dev-ds1-29412.

dev-ds1-29412: Jesus H. Christ, 15215. We talked about this in the hallway
yesterday. There's no way we can change the design _now_ , we've got people
coming in to kick the tires on this thing. Resolution: Won't Fix

qa-ds1-15215: You too???!!! You guys seriously don't understand what's at
stake here. Can we at least look at this in the next version? Status:
Activated.

dev-ds1-29412: Fine. Resolution: Postponed.

lukes: Lol

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hdctambien
Actually according to the book "Death Star" by Michael Reaves, the project
manager actually caught the exhaust port vulnerability during construction and
made a verbal agreement with the foreman to fix the problem.

Unfortunately the project manager got distracted by other matters soon after
and the foreman fell sick and the replacement foreman didn't know about the
changes to the plans so he went ahead and built the port to spec.

When the project manager found out, it was too late and the construction was
still behind schedule so she just left it.

This all happened AFTER the plans for the death star were leaked, too. So if
the vulnerability had been fixed, the rebels would have gone ahead with their
plan as normal and even Luke wouldn't have been able to hit that womprat.

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jonnathanson
Well, we knew there was high turnover with the staff on that thing. Vader's
people-management methods were pretty extreme and capricious, to say the
least. It's abundantly clear that ruling through terror didn't exactly bring
out the best in his workforce.

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thwarted
Don't forget that the majority of the people who worked on the Death Star were
contractors.

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jonnathanson
Most likely without decent health insurance, because who in their right mind
would insure those guys? Talk about occupational hazards.

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qntm
Talk about a hostile working environment, though.

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microtherion
The Sith must also have practiced pair programming, because "Always two there
are..."

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scrrr
I guessed they lacked the V in MVP.

