can?t complete their products before reaching a point at which 100 percent of their time is spent on process and thrashing. After spending several weeks or months in this condition, these projects are typically cancelled when management or the customer realizes that they are no longer moving forward. If you think that attention to process is needless overhead, consider that a canceled project has an overhead of 100 percent. Process to the Rescue Fortunately, an attention to software development process provides an alternative to this dismal scenario. When effective processes are used, the project profile looks like the one shown in Figure 4. Figure 4. During the first few weeks of the project, the process-oriented team will seem less productive than the process-phobic team because the level of thrashing will be the same on both projects and the process-oriented team will be spending a significant amount of its time on processes. But an investment made in process at the beginning of the project produces large returns later in the project. By the middle of the project, the team that focused on process early will have reduced the level of thrashing compared to the beginning of the project, and will have streamlined its processes. At that point, the process-phobic team will be just beginning to realize that thrashing is a significant problem and just beginning to institute some processes of its own. By the end of the project, the process-oriented team will be operating at a high-speed hum, with little thrashing,