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Dancing with the stars - The Sequel

 

Many sequels that follow successful movies have often done well but than others have also bombed.
The same goes with stars. Should your script include one after all?

 

Anger Management - the movie that is

Consider Oscar-winning star Jack Nicholson who had a string of successful movies over his career (As good as it gets, About Schmidt, A Few good men, Chinatown, to name just several of his hit movies) before he starred in Anger Management, a total artistic and financial flop.
Stars in successful movies can follow with appearances in non-hits and outright duds.
There is one thing you ought to remember when establishing your software production crew - Every movie has a star. Its just whether you knew who they were before you shipped your product.

Star power - a poor predictor

Regardless of how they achieve their success, stars that are able to offer their project managers even a modicum of predictability of success are stars whose required payments can drain a newborn start-up budget before the company has a chance to give its product a chance in a real market. High salaries and perks upfront can ensure that your better than Google app will never see a seed investment round, while settling for a lower share in the long run or an indulging stock option plan can drain your company of any predicted profitability attributable to the stars themselves.
There is one thing in common for star rich software projects and movies - they both cost a lot money and have a tendency to run over budget. A single programmer just cant put that much of protection value on the Gantt chart in a project involving many characters and events.

What makes a star?

Software projects are works of art often made by combining the talents of dozens of people - from architects to team leaders to business analysts to engineers to testers to coders - whose efforts must be carefully coordinated. Slight changes in the talent or in coordination can give rise to nontrivial changes in the final product. Oscar nominations can be left on the hard drive of the film editors or in the conversion of composers' score into soundtrack.
It is really a strong performance in an outstanding project that makes a star. Movies makes stars, not the other way around.

The winner's curse

One reason why predicting the success and contribution of stars is so tough is that the recruiting business is subject to the "winner's curse", which means that the winning bidder for a resource or product tends to pay too much.
The software industry face the winner's curse in one particular market: the market for creative talent. The winning bids for these various forms of talent will reflect the most optimistic assessments of a project's potential. Many of these winning bids will prove to be overly optimistic, which means that software projects can be expected to have a high failure rate in terms of the investors bottom lines.

Stardust

So far we have seen that star power on the development team can offer project sponsors some modest downside success protection and a slightly improved odds of the project actually making money, but star power is also a poor predictor of the success of a shipped software.
To avoid Anger Management (both the methodology and Nicholson's movie), here is an important tip: like any other sequel, the best way to understand the whole story is to go back and watch (or in this case read) the first work.