He prefaced this saying it might sound too obvious. My reaction was that it's a non-obvious but brilliant way to think about it. That was only reinforced as I continued to read his reasoning.

Thinking this way acknowledges in advance that software is complex, it's more complex than you think it is, and any software project you start is likely to take longer than you think it will. Both sides of a software project or contract ought to know this and say it out loud before starting. More importantly, it underscores that a large software project nearly always starts under pressure. Rarely is something big and expensive undertaken without at least mildly unrealistic goals. Having been there many times, I know the management thinking is often that if we don't have pressure and forces squeezing every bit of developer performance toward unrealistic goals, then we won't even achieve the realistic goals, and we'll be even later than we are.

Contractors are probably most affected by and in need of this way of thinking, though I'm well aware of how hard it is to admit you might be late on something when you're trying to win a contract, especially when the competition makes impossible promises.

Yea - I'm not really sure what the take away message here should be (although I found the article interesting).

I'm currently working at a late project right now that started early enough, but took too long to hire enough people to finish the project in time, and didn't use the time at the beginning of the project well enough to gather information about the current and future processes. Maybe that's an example of what the author means, but it certainly gets more complicated than "started too late" quite quickly...

> "All projects that finish late have this one thing in common: they started late"

McConnell has a really good discussion of this in Rapid Development, calling it "The Fuzzy Front-end" of a project.

"Everyone knows" that certain projects "have" to be undertaken, but they will often just be talked about and talked about and talked about until it's too late to do anything but talk about not talking about things in future.

Or they had enough time, but focus was shifted elsewhere during the project, or resources were taken away, or the stakeholders kept changing their mind about what they wanted, or the projects were mismanaged, or the people working on them were incompetent/lazy to an extent that no amount of time would have been enough. Ect, etc, etc..