Comments on: Schedule Game #2: 90% Done

By: James Thiele

James Thiele — Mon, 16 May 2005 04:21:20 +0000

A clasic statement in software development is that the first 80% of the job takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% takes the other 80% of the time. Feel free to use 90% and 10% if you prefer.

By: Dave Smith

Dave Smith — Sun, 08 May 2005 04:08:36 +0000

I first heard “90% done” from a manager in the mid 70’s about a mainframe integration project that had been 90% done–or at least reported as such–for the past year. Nobody took the estimate seriously by that point, and “90% done” was used a code phrase for “They don’t have a clue about where they really are.” It wasn’t long thereafter that I first learned about Schedule Chicken.

By: Democritus

Democritus — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 23:16:41 +0000

Zeno’s Paradox, right?

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 22:01:23 +0000

I bet the 90% game is directly related to the fact that I always underestimate by a factor of 2.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:18:42 +0000

I believe it was this very blog that also passed along the PM joke about “We’re 90% complete, we just need to finish the other 90%.”
The 90% completion “crawl” as described in this post makes me think of basketball. You have all of this time to play the game, and yet that final minute seems to drag on forever. I wonder if it’s because of the tenths of seconds winding down whereas normally the time clock reads MM:SS.
Same with the 90% thing. If your %-ile complete tracking system jumps in increments of 10, once you hit 90, there’s nowhere to go to show progress without flat-out closing out the project as “complete”.
I wonder if a better way would be to establish what the criteria is for each block of 10% before advancing the project status to that level.