Eeek.. i make a little joke the " " i hoped would let everyone in on that it was toungue in check and didn't mean it for real... and go off to my weekly game and get back and i find i have started something...

Denny, i was joking, there is lots of stuff on the WIP, and they are all clipping along. Most of that was a joke the only thing i was serious about was did the HFZP move, i really didn't get a good look at the WIP meter for it, or i should say i didn't fix in my mind where al of the things were and don't know if it or anything moved or not.

For the most part i don't hit the front page and go straight to the Forums on both Mel and your pages. becuase this is where the action is and becuase both you and mel really let your consumers know what is going on, i find i get a better read of what is happening in here than on the WIP Meter.

Don't take my Slow comment as anything other than ribbing, yes i guess it was in poor taste becuase WWG is very fast these days, it was more of a remembrence.

Sigh the problems of the Internet and no tone in writting i wasn't trying to be mean, just having a bit of a joke (odd mood today) and just giving some props to Mels becuase i have been digging those ships he has been putting out, no real disrespectment to the Fine Staff at WWG.

(PS Mel the Platers loved the UD-41 the, next week they are going to attempt to steal it to get off planet. in our RPG game and then they will go to the PC's transport made with First Ligt, it's all good..)

Well, two months is a pretty average wait for something really fabulous. That'll give me time to build the mostly fabulous items I currently have, and to get my new ink orders in.

Do you think HFZP and 'Hostile Takeover' are connected somehow? Is WWG expanding their lines from not just writing adventure models but creating their own gaming systems?
I really should listen to WWG radio on wednesdays instead of Pandora.com all the time.

Post #10, whoo-hoo!
Eric

Things get done when they're done, and not a moment sooner

As a project manager for software development I know a thing or two about managing various bits and pieces that go into a project. What surprises me is when I work on something for somebody who has no clue that there ARE various bits.

Some rules of thumb for me:

Take how long the actual engineer thinks it will take to whip up some actual functioning code based off of designs that haven't been written, and multiply by 3 to get the engineering time. This is one-third of the time needed.

Double that to account for the analysis and actual writing and rewriting of the specs until they are signed off.

Add another third to allow for test plans, code revisions, any documentation.

So a two week engineering estimate becomes 6 weeks, plus another 12 weeks, so we're up to 18 weeks.

Oh, you mean product support would like to be trained on how to troubleshoot the new module? Or, you mean training would like to know how the new module works?

So you fudge another 10% so in this case it becomes a 20 week job.

Now the fun part, that's not 20 calendar weeks, oh no. A 40-hour work week does not contain 40 hours of focused work. There are times you're waiting for fomebody to get back to you, times you spend doing mundane things like timesheets nad fazes and corporate training and team meetings and all that admin stuff. Typical industry standard is to schedule projects based on a 30 hour week.

So our 20 weeks of 40 hours becomes almost 27 weeks of calendar time.

The boss hears an early estimate of 2 weeks of engineering, and when he gets the project all mapped out it's 6 months from today.

Of course, some stuff can be done in parallel, so it's not really 6 months later but I ran this single threaded to make a point. The cost of building this bit of code wasn't 80 hours but much closer to 800 hours.

Creating cool artistic bits of engineering requires not only inspiration and perspiration but preparation, and a host of other (some might say more mundane) things.

As much as I'd like to have everything I want the instant it occurs to me I need it (in my case, ANY of your current sci-fi projects in the works), I'll happily stand by and wait for the finished goods to make my jaw drop, rather than get something that causes me to say "They don't make 'em like they used to" and mean that in a BAD way.

WWG stuff just keeps getting better and better. Keep it up

Steve