Economy Size Geek

Dr. Dobb’s | Dr. Dobb’s Agile Newsletter | July 24, 2006

In astronomy there is the concept of red-shifting and blue-shifting: red shifting occurs when a body is moving away from you (the wavelength of the light increases) and blue-shifting occurs when a body is moving towards you (the wavelength of the light decreases). This is useful input for determining the speed and direction of something. In software development we have green shifting which occurs when people rework the information contained in status reports to make them more politically palatable to their manager.

Basically this is where “spin” is applied to a project status to make it seem “green” - in this case that means go not evironmentally friendly.

I’ve seen this more that I care to admit in my career. Truth be told, it seems that the likelyhood that green shifting will occur is directly related to the importance of the project. Which is unfortunate, because it is those big expensive projects that you stand to lose the most when they fail. That failure is unlikely to be avoided by sweeping it under the carpet and avoiding sounding the alarm (it was a cliche two-fer).

This is actually one of the things I like about the agile projects I’ve worked on lately. The goal is to get the hardest most complicated stuff into play as fast as possible, so we can alert everyone involved if we’ve hit a problem.

“Bad news first, no suprises”