Another cluetrain passes Joel Spolsky right on by as he talks in one post about how terrible it is when clients want all sorts of changes right at the end of the project, because they really didn’t read/understand/interpret the spec correctly. He uses himself as the anecodotal customer who got what he wanted — only it turns out, it wasn’t what he wanted. And everybody knows that Joel’s specs are exhaustive, so what’s the problem?
Two or three posts down, he is all agog over Evidence-Based Scheduling — another micrometer wrench in his Gadgetron 3000 toolbox, which is supposed to Solve The Scheduling Dilemma Once and For All. All sorts of Joel’s friends agree! EBS is REALLY REALLY GREAT!
So — which is it? Are schedules and estimates good, nay, even indispensable? Will EBS solve the Terrible Client Dilemma, or will customers continue to come in at the last minute and say “Change these twenty things, because I really didn’t understand how it would all look/work/perform before I saw it.”
For myself, once I accepted the that (a) customers don’t fully understand all of their own requirements early on in the project lifecycle and (b) they appreciate a vendor who can provide the flexibility to accommodate their changes, I became convinced of Agile’s strengths. Joel may not like it, but the Evidence-Based World (EBW) suggests that clients like him are the norm, not the exception.
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