>Hi folks ----
>
>I know from personal experience that this one happens, especially when a project team is composed of people who look at a project from two methodlogical camps, like DBMS folks vs. OOSE folks.
>
>Again, this is brought to us from those wonderful folks at Cunningham & Cunningham at http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?AnalysisParalysis.
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>Analysis Paralysis is a term given to the situation where a team of otherwise intelligent and well-meaning analysts enter into a phase of analysis that only ends when the project is cancelled.
>Frequently, in such situations, designers and developers are staffed, and have no work to do. Busy work is given, and training, just to keep them from quitting before the analysts deliver. This waste is often the reason for cancellation.
>
>Common causes are:
>
>*The lure of infinite composability and decomposibility
>*Insistence on completing all analysis before beginning design.
>*Regular change of leads and their philosophies (each trashing and restarting the work of the previous)
>*Too many learning curves at once (underqualified analyst) causing incessant revisiting of prior work
>*Lack of goals
>*Increasingly conflicting goals (often political)
>*Creative speculation where discovery and definition are required.
>*Big Project Syndrome: this one will do it all, will use the latest tools, will use a new paradigm, will use all new developers, will start with a clean slate, will handle all use cases of two or more existing systems in the first release, etc.
Hey John,
I'd say most of the times the problem is people that are unwilling or resisting other people's ideas. IMO, this falls on the same lines as your previous anti-pattern post. A mistake on the approach may also be to blame.
From reading the extreme programming page, the thing I like the most is the "Do the simplest thing that can possibly do the work" (or something like that) concept. I've had the privilege to work with a couple of great leaders, and now I realize both of them used this approach. Finish one small task that works and go on to the next. The "analysis paralysis" problem results from trying to do more than what is on scope.
Of course, other people would say you're just being lazy.