For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken
I'm attending a National Defense Industry Association conference on Program Management. I took a break to read some emails - you can only take so much of Earned Value, probabilistic cost modeling, a DCMA self assessment audit guidelines.
There's a discussion going on about how agile software development methods can be applied to safety critical systems. First I earn my living working on programs that contain safety critical system. As well I designed and deployed a safety critical system - the Tricon a classic 80's product name.
The discussion from the agile point of view is typical agile - we've got this really cool way of doing things, you can use it on your problem too.
In the absence of a domain and context, probably not. I spoke for two nights this week at Carnegie Mellon University, San Jose on the 5 immutable principles of project management. My co-speaker is a senior manager at Pay Pal, which make very good use of Scrum in the development and maintenance of its code base.
One of the learning from that series of lectures is that a software development method needs to have a domain and context for it to be effective. If we say a development method is valuable in the absence of that domain and context, we are following Mencken axiom
