Part II. Goals
LET'S SAY THAT YOU'VE GOT A JOB TO DO, AND YOU NEED SOFTWARE TO DO IT. AND LET'S SAY THAT you've got two choices. The first is a brilliantly engineered piece of software. It never crashes, has a beautiful user interface, and has great technical support. It's fast, a pleasure to use, and inexpensive, and it runs on any operating system and practically any computer. But it doesn't do what you want. The second piece of software, on the other hand, is terrible. It's buggy, it crashes all the time, and it's slow. It runs only on an obscure operating system, and needs a very expensive and very fast machine if you want it to be at all usable. It's got a terrible user interface that makes even the simplest task a chore. But it does 20% of what you need. Which one do you choose?
Unfortunately for you, you'll end up with the poorly written piece of software, because it actually does something that you need it to do. And while this seems like a somewhat ridiculous scenario, it's actually not that far from the truth for a lot of us.
The worst possible mistakes in working with teams happen when your team's goals diverge. And, unfortunately, it's a lot more common than a lot of us realize. This shouldn't really be a huge surprise. Anyone who's cracked open a college textbook on software engineering has probably ...
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