Geeky Peek :: Dev Fail

Probably worth saving before Geeky Peek disappears. Peek's been a cluster recently. I finally gave up on them. Tortured software, poor (and getting poorer) service, inability to stick to the message ("Email? Buggy. But hey, now there's TwitterPeek!"), updates via mail -- and then only a $19 cable, and then they finally broke everyone's old hardware, alienating the entire installed user base. Insane. People sell WiFi SDHC cards for less than the postage they've wasted.

Anyhow, after not quite two months of radio silence, Geeky Peek is back. Sounds like it's a systemic problem. House would probably guess auto-immune.

"Signs you may need new developers,executives, dev process, etcโ€ฆ

1. You spend more time writing specs than developing

2. You lose months waiting for specs to *sign-off* before dev starts.

3. You have delivered nothing over x months where x > 1

4. You spend more time doing maintenance than new development, because you didnโ€™t architect it right, keep it up to date on tech, etc in the first place

5. Sales/marketing/executives donโ€™t talk to the dev teamโ€ฆ ever.

6. You have more managers than developers (project managers, product managers, dev managers, support managers, etc)"

7. After having sat on their own for 6 months coding big new feature x, the developer โ€œdelivers itโ€ only to hear โ€œit sucksโ€, because it does and nobody cared to look at it for 6 months.

8. โ€œSign-offsโ€ occur on giant spec documents instead of on the working product.

I could go on. It is very unfortunate when a companyโ€™s development looks and feels like the above, because it is soooo much easier to do better.