Application lifecycle management

We are collecting, and will be voting on, our favorite ALM Ailments, that is conditions that affect a team or individual in their attempt to be productive with Application Lifecycle Management.

So - here's the first one:

Post Traceability Distress Disorder

Symptoms include:

Is your development pipeline bloated and blocked with releases that aren't moving into production?

Taking care of business with frequent movement of capability into production is a sign of a healthy Enterprise system.

The paralyzing fear and ultimate inaction caused by the thought of having to integrate multiple software systems.

The fear of passing status spreadsheets back and forth and constantly asking "who has the latest version?"

Designarrhea is the uncontrolled need to constantly produce highly sophisticated technical design documents and specifications.
Usually observed on subjects working in a waterfall environment, where documents are thrown over the fence after completion
(but need to be reworked constantly).

Symptoms:

- High "output" of technical design documents, that may be technically/methodically elaborated, but give no additional business value
- Spending whole day sitting at the workstation trying to keep everything in sync with reality
- May also lead to social isolation from the rest of the team, due to increasing language disorders.
This is assumed to be a coincidence from a cross-infection with metamodeling-tapeworms and DSLs (document-slavery languages).

Possible cures:
- Apply some "Model Storming cole", leading to "just enough" design to get the job done
- re-sozialize subject by establishing a "whole team" environment, speaking a common language
 

Symptoms:

 Unhealthy fear of working with others stemming from:

•  conditioning that interacting while working is perceived as “goofing off”
•  over-stimulation of technology interaction to the detriment of people interaction
•  irrational fear that another person’s input could impede the work in my silo
•  Severe loss of team function
•  Inability to perform simple time zone math

Related Disorders:

•  Silositis

This condition is exacerbated by technology and the ever-growing number of information sources as they provide even more ways to obtain and leverage information. Results in productivity paralysis.

• Inability to focus on relevant information
• Inability to complete tasks
• Inability to grasp scattered information
• Impaired visual and auditory function in presence of excessive information

Symptoms:

When your blood pressure is directly proportional to your Application Lifecycle Management deployment. 

The sufferer from Macro-Excelivity has spent so long planning, tracking and estimating project work using excel spreadsheets with their own suite of hand-tuned VBA macros that they now have a complete inability to relate to any other way of approaching the problem, because, as they would put it, "Excel can do anything".

Symptoms include:

• They can often be heard muttering "Oh no I should have pressed shift-F9 for manual recalculate!" and "Aargh I forgot it's control-shift-enter for an array formula" to themselves
• At lunch breaks they may be heard asking colleagues if orange or yellow would be a better color for at-risk activities
• The walls of their work areas are often papered with exploded pie charts and 3-d bar charts so that even when they are using email or editing a document they can at a glance satisfy their need to remind themselves of the power of Excel

Treatment of sufferers has to be approached with extreme care - it may be best to relocate them to a padded cell comfortable room before undertaking any serious re-training.

Osteostatusquosis is a disease leading to fragile bones from lack of strenghtening and improvement.  It is usually caused by perfoming the same limited movements over and over. 

Symptoms:

• Inactive software capability improvement tools

• Evidence of excessive scrap and rework that does not heal

Complications:

• Strong indicator of death from Complyhorrexis, a complication resulting from long-term Acute Myasthenia Complitis, in which the Enterprise experiences a rupture caused by a compliance failure.

GonerHere is a STD (Software Transmitted Disease). It is primarily caused by close-quarters confinement and tube feeding management-imposed deadlines - this causes the developer to have recurring and severe symptoms such as:

• Glassy-eyed stare due to limited visibility into other development areas
• A pale and watery complexion which rapidly develops sunburn even when exposed to normal daylight
• Episodes of  itching-to-get-a-better-job

In addition the condition is very contagious particularly between developers confined with other developers in herds teams. This ability to spread with even limited body contact is often cited by managers as the very reason for keeping sub-teams closely co-located and strongly isolated from other teams. This defies all rational logic because it is not unknown for workers to do something called 'socializing' out of work, immediately defeating all management attempts to isolate sufferers.

The symptoms can be treated, but left untreated GonerHere can be terminal for the developer and potentially for anyone he or she comes into contact with - so possibly the whole project team.

You may have heard of Gall Stones which are crystalline accretions capable of causing extreme physical pain when they block the Bile Duct. Mile Stones are a related (but psychological rather than physical) condition which you can see coming from a long way ahead. The apparent lack of threat (because of the distance) causes complacency and a feeling of no pressure, however on waking one morning the sufferer suddenly finds that the Mile Stone is looming over them causing symptoms of twitching, stress, long hours at work, and loss of sleep. The similarity with Gall Stones doesn't sound great but passing a Mile Stone without completing the required work can be a very painful experience - just like that experienced passing a Gall Stone ;-)