Peanut butter and software planning

re: Peanut butter and software planning

Walter Lounsbery — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:55:08 GMT

The decisions you talk about are broadly valid, but I think ignore the real benchmarks and drivers. We would all like to decide on resource allocation based on logic and the best information at hand from the development perspective. That set provides enough hard work and has logically defined limits.

But if we produce a product, it is meant to be consumed. There is a customer who makes their decisions differently and is the ultimate arbiter of significant support and features. That is the only real driver, and the one that is least quantifiable. Especially when it comes to new key features that excite the development team.

Maybe that's why I like the Web application arena. It's a lot easier to establish short delivery cycles and feedback channels! When .NET first appeared on the scene, it looked like workstation software delivery could get more like Web applications, and Microsoft would support that.

So my meandering bottom line suggestion: keep improving the great deployment and support story for .NET workstation software! The rest will fall out from listening to the customer and acting on that in a reasonable way.

re: Peanut butter and software planning

Val Savvateev — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:30:03 GMT

http://blog.onthematter.com/archive/2005/11/22/26.aspx

re: Peanut butter and software planning

BradA — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:05:17 GMT

You are right Walter – you still have to do what customers want or more specifically what customers will value. That is fundamentally how you pick the few areas you invest in. Think of the target customer (maybe new or existing customer base) what are the few things that really get the excited? Focus just on those.

To Val this concept of no-peanut butter is self-evident. No one that wanted to make money would peanut butter. But I have seen software projects that make lots and lots of small investments… each one doesn’t look like it takes away from the “big things”, but in sum it is a huge drain. So I am arguing for a more extreme approach… Do zero, none, zilch features outside of the target area..
As far as their being no such thing as good and bad – well, I will not go their in this blog ;-)

re: Peanut butter and software planning

Val Savvateev — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:39:18 GMT

Brad, don't get me wrong, I sympathize your idea of "no features outside the target area" and believe that the most, especially the developers here, will like it as well.
The truth is, my company had a number of "quality improvement" releases. The scope for those included a couple of "big fish" items, but the majority of work was devoted to exactly "face-lifting" all across the application (i.e. bunch of fixes such as changing colors, button placements, corky error messages etc). When the user experience can be improved at a relatively low cost, I kind of like that too. I don't know if this example falls under the "peanut buttering" category however, because we were still trying to please the customer (and so, keep being customer-aware) with a reasonable amount of effort.
I'm glad you didn't take the "no good or bad" idea seriously - that was a tongue-in-cheek conclusion (wanted to see if somebody gets into the trap).

re: Peanut butter and software planning

JD — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 23:29:17 GMT

I think that's wrong, Brad.

Peanut butter is needed, but you only put one flavor of Jelly on top of it. The jelly is your sweet new single-focus improvement, but make sure you've got a nice layer of peanut butter down there of solid improvements for your base.

In 2.0 for example, wow generics are sexy. Awesome. But hell yeah I like the peanut butter of wrapping non-Exception exceptions (removing the need for catch{} mostly) and fluff like string.IsNullOrEmpty). You can try to argue that those were targetted too, but in reality there's a grab bag of small improvements that really affect people, and they don't add up to some grand Vision or Feature or Target. They're just peanut butter.

All peanut butter can be hard to swallow, and all jelly can be too much sweetness for the adults. The mix, though, is surprisingly good.

冒似我创造了一个新词汇：浇花生酱（peanut buttering）

Joycode@Ab110.com — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:14:48 GMT

【原文地址】 Looks like I created a new word: Peanut Buttering 【原文发表日期】 03 September 08 09:28 回到早先在做VS2008计划的时候

Looks like I created a new word: Peanut Buttering

Programming — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:20:10 GMT

Back in the early days of VS2008 planning, I captured some of our thoughts on planning and looks like