Friday, September 12, 2008

The Haunt of Scope Creep

Yet this is another fine Friday evening. As usual, Cuppa is blogging while having a beer by his side.

Scope creep is the topic today. This term means uncontrollable changes in project scope.

This happens very often in job because of pointy-hair boss thinks "it is just a trivial change that takes only 3 minutes of your time", but the job blows up and you lose 3 weeks of your time. However our pointy-hair boss is far more brilliant than just adding merely one task on your plate, at that point, you are having a scope creep.

For Cuppa, the scope creep happens when I am drilling deep down into C++. On my way I found a lot of interesting tidbits, like generic programming, pattern design, the STL, and a lot of libraries written in C++. I am side-tracked by all these topics to the point I nearly forgot what my initial intention was to get a better understanding of core C++ first.

This is not the first time scope creep happens to me. For example way back when I was in college, I was studying multi-dimensional calculus, but ended up getting a lot of irrelevant maths books on my way back from library. I would go and get books on topology, number theory, functional analysis, etc. All of those which were (and still are) beyond my comprehension then.

Therefore this time I will concentrate only on the topic on hand, and will put aside all those topics until I am done.

How about my personal life? Well, my mom once again is concerned about my getting a girl friend. At this stage, I already admit defeat of winning MAK over and just let my mom do whatever pleases her. I told her "Whatever, as long as she is a woman, not too ugly, not too bitchy, and can tolerate a nerd like me, fine."

2 comments:

The Soothsayer said...

Talking about going off topic, I started on one paper, realised I lacked the background and now I'm like 20 papers & books from the original, delving into various other subjects a bit off-tangent from the original.

Cuppa Chai said...

Yeap, that is typical scope creep. I have to admit some of the most useful knowledge I have was obtained during these reading sprees, but this doesn't happen too often