Chapter 9. You Aren't Special
REMEMBER WHAT YOUR MOM TOLD YOU? "You're special! You're unique!" Right, just like every other boy or girl who had a mom! Believing that loving lie leads to common software project problems.
I coach many different teams. Without fail, the teams who believe they're "special" are always behind when judged by how well they meet their software project metrics. Because they think they're special, they have a strong inclination to reinvent everything. They think, "No other team could have possibly developed usable software, or at least not as outstanding as what we create among ourselves." Instead of learning from the mistakes of other developer teams, they insist on making their own mistakes. Over and over and over. At company expense.
They spend so much time rewriting, debugging, and putting their own twist on software and tools[4] that are already industry standard that they never finish customer projects. The ones they should sell to people for money. Those mythical, magical products that would be as special as the team, if only it ever got them written.
To hear this unique group of developers tell it, there are no existing build systems that can handle their "one of a kind" requirements. So, they must write a new one for each new project. Instead of reusing an existing object-database mapping tool, they write their own. Web application framework? ...
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