The Death Star was an Agile Project | Hacker News Reader

The Death Star was an Agile Project

greatandsmallblog.com

63 pointsmopoke19 comments

I think its a perfect example of an Agile manager - anybody that isn't on board, throw under a bus.

The Death Star was a trap[1]. It wasn't semi-complete. It was fully operational[2] and designed to lure in the Rebel fleet to a single location. Destroying the rebels in detail had proved to be too time consuming.

[1] Ackbar, Return of the Jedi "It's a trap!"

[2] The Emperor, Return of the Jedi "As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!"

Well... We all know what happed to admirals Ozzel and Mottie when they said "no repro" and "woops, missed that" in the daily scrum with Darth Vader.

I'm not sure I'd hold up a project that left a fatal vulnerability exposed to the world as a "good" example of a methodology.

Article is talking about the second Death Star. They removed the 'small thermal exhaust port' of that one. Rather it got blown up cause it was under construction leaving a path to the core open (and the moon based shield generator got blown up).

I'm amazed they didn't build at least some redundancy into their shielding plans. I mean, come on. They fixed the fatal flaw from the first design, but you'd think they would have learned a more valuable lesson: it's not the exhaust port; it's the fact that you keep leaving one critical dependency in the plan each time.

No, no.. the construction was always perfect. There just wasn't an acceptance test for that. If PM had wanted Death Star of the poking-it-there-won't-make-it-explode variety, then they should have written a User Story for that. Duh.

Bug: Thermal exhaust port is vulnerable to external attack that can lead to total system failure

Opened By: qa-ds1-15215

Severity: 1

Fix By: DS2

Comments:

qa-ds1-15215: I was checking out the design and noticed that thermal exhaust port AH-51 is open to the world. Someone could drop an explosive in here and bring down the system. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

pm-ds1-32542: Well, duh. Who in their right mind is going to be dropping explosives into their own system? Resolution: By Design

qa-ds1-15215: Status: Activated. Are you serious? Do you not understand the implications of this design problem?

pm-ds1-32542: Assigned To: dev-ds1-29412.

dev-ds1-29412: Jesus H. Christ, 15215. We talked about this in the hallway yesterday. There's no way we can change the design now, we've got people coming in to kick the tires on this thing. Resolution: Won't Fix

qa-ds1-15215: You too???!!! You guys seriously don't understand what's at stake here. Can we at least look at this in the next version? Status: Activated.

dev-ds1-29412: Fine. Resolution: Postponed.

lukes: Lol

Actually according to the book "Death Star" by Michael Reaves, the project manager actually caught the exhaust port vulnerability during construction and made a verbal agreement with the foreman to fix the problem.

Unfortunately the project manager got distracted by other matters soon after and the foreman fell sick and the replacement foreman didn't know about the changes to the plans so he went ahead and built the port to spec.

When the project manager found out, it was too late and the construction was still behind schedule so she just left it.

This all happened AFTER the plans for the death star were leaked, too. So if the vulnerability had been fixed, the rebels would have gone ahead with their plan as normal and even Luke wouldn't have been able to hit that womprat.

Well, we knew there was high turnover with the staff on that thing. Vader's people-management methods were pretty extreme and capricious, to say the least. It's abundantly clear that ruling through terror didn't exactly bring out the best in his workforce.

Don't forget that the majority of the people who worked on the Death Star were contractors.

Most likely without decent health insurance, because who in their right mind would insure those guys? Talk about occupational hazards.

more like...

dev-ds1-29412: Okay, fine... but this is gonna delay ActiveRecord integration.

pm-ds1-32542: Fuck. NM. Resolution: Postponed.

This is one of those comments I really wish I could give more than 1 point to.

"and the moon based shield generator got blown up"

Taken down by a flaw in their hosting environment.

They were blind sided by a DDOS attack followed by a 0-day exploit on their walkers which, through privilege escalation, resulted in the moon base being compromised. People just didn't take security seriously enough.

The CEO of HBGary Imperial has since resigned.

Talk about a hostile working environment, though.

The Sith must also have practiced pair programming, because "Always two there are..."

I guessed they lacked the V in MVP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com