The Duck Technique in corporate programming is an applied example of Parkinsons law of triviality: a programmer expects their corporate office to insist on a change to something (anything at all) on every presentation to show that theyre participating, so a programmer adds an element they expect corporate to remove on purpose. Quoted from Jeff Atwoods blog, Coding Horror This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didnt, they werent adding value. The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queens animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the actual animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, That looks great. Just one thing: get rid of the duck.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:53:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015