Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainpiggies | Hacker News Reader

"delivered on time"

It's even better. They are about one year ahead of schedule.

Ahead of schedule based on an adjusted schedule during construction. They are slightly behind the originally planned schedule (a couple years).

Obviously this is still a very well executed project overall.

Well obviously it's part of the Requirement Engineering process to adjust the schedule when the requirements change.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with changing the schedule. Anything else would be quite dumb and probably just delusional. Perfectly predicting the future is not possible and if honest mistakes or simply unknowns lead to this then that’s just normal.

However, here “ahead of schedule” is used as a, well, I guess compliment and for that it’s important to know the context. That they adjusted the schedule is obviously not at all a problem and, as I said, for a project this big the couple years it took longer aren’t really that relevant even.

And, more often than not, these requirement changes are used as excuses for extending the deadline so that project ends up being done "on time". I've worked in management on multi-year waterfall projects and this is how this game is played.

It would be fun to see an "agile" tunnel project.

"This rock is too solid to drill through with our machines!" – "Ok, for now let's just drill around it and make it an underground rollercoaster instead of a railway, we can get back to the original design later!"

This actually happened in St. Petersburg, when they ran into difficulties tunneling under the river on Line 2. They ended up going under the difficult section, and now there's a 6% downgrade on that section of the line, which is pretty much a rollercoaster by subway train standards.

That's not agile, that's a pivot :)

Not in this case, as the train is specified to go at 250 km/h, which means that the tunnel had to be pretty straight, or else the train might derail at that speed.

Which would make it an even more fun roller coaster!

Just like the UK 2012 Olympics. It came in under budget. Despite the budget quadrupling since the project was started.

There's a million reasons to love Switzerland, and now there's 57km more of it. This is amazing.

Once the new Berlin airport is finished in about 5-10 years, I'll fly down there to celebrate.

> Once the new Berlin airport is finished in about 5-10 years, I'll fly down there to celebrate.

Rather if the new Berlin airport is ever finished...

In other words: If you want to celebrate, rather fly down to Berlin now and celebrate the opening of the Gotthard tunnel in Berlin.

I know, I live there ;)

To all you western europeans complaining: come down to Brazil, and I'll take you on a tour of our "Top Ten Most Abandoned-Halfway Billion Dollar Government Works" ;-)

Oh, and just to give an example, the construction of one of our nuclear power plants began in 1984 but was halted in 1986, only to begin where it left off in 2010, to be finished in 2015. Wait, now it is in 2016. Nope, just checked, it should be in 2018. All the while, the cost to maintain the stuff that was already bought or built is around 20 million a year, since 1986. So yeah, this one is on our TOP TEN list. This little swiss tunnel is not.

Well construction of the Cologne Cathedral started in 1248 and was halted in 1473, only to begin where it left off in 1842 and was eventually completed in 1880 - so don't give up hope ;)

The should have checked in with the Byzantians, the Hagia Sofia was finished in 6 years and remained the largest Cathedral for almost 1000 years.

In Spain the Sagrada Família cathedral has been under construction for 134 years and has another 30 to go.

And it was totally worth the little wait!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com