Alex’s rules for surviving a software development project.

Rule Number 1: Never promise a release date.

Don’t even hint. Anything you say is guaranteed to be wrong, especially when you’re almost finished. There’s no better way to invoke the curse of month-long delays than to utter the word “tomorrow”.

There’s a good reason for this. Estimating the time to complete a task becomes harder as you get closer to a finished release. The things you do at the beginning of a project or release cycle tend to be well defined, and relatively easy to estimate. The things left till last are likely to be intermittent bugs, issues that only occur on certain platform configurations, Heisenbugs, and all of the minor niggling problems that you’ve forgotten about. They are, by definition, elusive and unpredictable, and hence impossible to estimate.