(^94) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
The Fallacy of Perfect Knowledge
The Fallacy of Perfect Knowledge
David Wood
Fredericksburg, Virginia, U.S.
WE All KnoW In oUR hEART oF hEARTS that we don’t know everything.
Every day, hopefully, we learn a bit more about our profession, our society, and
ourselves. But we simply can’t know it all. If we stop learning we fall behind
rapidly, especially in the software industry. The idea that one can apprentice
to a trade and practice that trade the rest of one’s life has gone the way of the
dodo. Remember the dodo bird? No? That’s the point.
Technology, techniques, and the ideas upon which they are built change far
too rapidly in our era for any practitioner to know all he or she needs to know
at any point in time. We must constantly learn and we must equally adjust to
a state of ignorance, which requires us to spend some portion of every project
researching the knowledge we need. Why, then, do we persist in pretending
that we must, or even can, know everything about a software project during its
development phase?
The history of software engineering is replete with attempts to control software
projects, through carefully bound development and maintenance activities to
prevent buggy, failed software. Most such methodologies, such as the classic
“waterfall” methodology, presume that with sufficient time and up-front dili-
gence, a software project can be completely understood. Many demand that
requirements be set in stone before a line of code is written. What nonsense!
Giving up on knowing it all during development, we might think that we can
know it all later. Several software development methodologies presume this,