August 03, 2004
Steve McConnell has been around:
The irony of this dynamic is that these unsuccessful projects eventually do as much planning and process management as a successful project would. They have to implement defect tracking to manage all the bugs being reported. They begin estimating more carefully as the release date approaches. Toward the end of the project, the project team might re-estimate as often as every week or even every day. They spend time managing expectations of project stakeholders, convincing them that the project will eventually be released. They may begin tracking defects and imposing standards for debugging code before it's integrated with already-debugged code. But because they begin these practices late in the project, the benefits from these practices are leveraged over only a small part of the project.
A second source of code-and-fix development's appeal is that it requires no training. In an industry in which the average level of software engineering training is low, it has been the most common method by default.