Joel:
February 13th, 2002
Joel: The
Iceberg Secret, Revealed. Summary: Tune your presentations to
account for non-programmer distortion; that is, if your audience will
pay disproportionate attention to the UI chrome, then scale
back (or up) the chrome to better convey the state of the entire
software project.
There’s also a little SAPE case
study in there, though Joel doesn’t know it:
“Our miserable sales person agreed to a fixed price contract to build
what was basically unspecified, and the customer’s lawyers were sharp
enough to get a clause in the contract that they don’t have to pay us
until ‘acceptance by customer,’ so we had to put a team of nine
developers on their project for two years and only got paid $800.”