About 32 Statuses

Welcome to 32 Statues, the blog about software development and design and all that can go wrong with it. I write about things that I’ve seen go wrong (with the names changed to protect the innocent), and what I feel could have happened to make them right. It’s my way of learning from my mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others. Because of my limited practice, the stories here will generally be limited to the world of web development.

About the name

What’s with the name? It’s a reference to two of my favorite failures, both of which share a bizarre coincidence.

The first failure was a response to a continually slipping project (you’ve heard of those, right?) by forcing better communication, and what better way to facilitate communication than to have meetings. There were stand up meetings every morning (but not a scrum; this was very much not Agile). These daily meetings could last as long as an hour, and typically involved the team snipping at one another. Given the average of 22 workdays during a month, this mean there were 22 status meetings per month for the team as a whole. But then there were the management status meetings in which the details from the morning status meetings were relayed to upper management.  These occurred twice weekly, on Monday and Friday. Given a month is four weeks, plus a few extra days, this meant there were usually 9 of these “super status” meetings.  Then the entire company got together once a month to discuss how things were going. 22 morning status meetings + 9 “super status” meetings + 1 company meeting = 32 status meetings per month.  That’s a lot of status.

The other failure was a result of runaway brainstorming.  The failed application had several fields named “status”, but there were many different meanings of status. For example, sometimes “status” meant the underlying record status (Active, Deleted, etc.), sometimes it meant the workflow status (Draft, Submitted, etc.), and other times it was a status of the domain object (Married, Divorced, etc.). The solution to this confusing use of the word “status” was to put all possible status values into a single table. When all was said and done, there were a total of 32 entries in the status table, with many synonyms and with differing uses.

32 status meetings, 32 status table entries, 32 statuses. Get it?

About me

I am Jack Littleton, a software developer in the Greater Sacramento, CA area.  I’ve been involved in professional software development for nearly 20 years, including all aspects of the software development life cycle. I started in configuration management, switched to quality assurance, then development, and then on to design and architecture.