In Managing Product Development: Need Help with a Phrase. Johanna Rothman asks for help looking for a phrase:
I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of "mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting effect."
In nautical terms this is called "Taking a fix" – before the days of GPS systems sailors know that if didn’t take a regular fix that eventually your planned course and real course would differ by such a large amount that you would unexpectedly find a coast line or a reef. I think the same is true in software development.
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