Herding Cats

Alert - Just So We Don't Get Confused As To The Source Of Our Little Problem

Connecting the Dots in Agile

I presented a briefing to an internal agile development group at a major defense contractor this week. The topic was - as always - integrating Earned Value Management with Agile Software Development. The discussion started with connecting the WBS to... Read more →

Quote of the Day

It is good that most people don't understand our banking and financial system. For if they did there would be a revolution by morning. - Henry Ford Read more →

Standish Numbers

I'm not a fan of the approach taken by Standish to report success rates in IT for many reasons, not the least of which the lack of transparency for the source data, the statistical processing methods, and the population statistics.... Read more →

Task Saturation = Poor Performance

There was lots of talk awhile ago about the poor results from multitasking. Afterburners is a training organization we've participated in before. At PMI conferences and on a government contract. They can speak directly to multitasking and task saturation in... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Why Base The Discussion On Mathematics?

I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard against the appliance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The Prussian General Staff, under the elder von Moltke…did not expect a plan of operations to survive beyond the first contact with the enemy. They set only the broadest of objectives and emphasized seizing unforeseen opportunities as they arose… –... Read more →

"Doing" Risk Management

Is this your plan for handling risk? If so, then you're already late, over budget, and the thing you're building is probably not going to work right when you're done. So let's start with a risk statement, how to speak... Read more →

Big Program Guidance - a Caution to Agile

The notion that large programs have heavy, unwieldy processes, and that agile methods - both software development and project management - are the solution is many times just that "notional." Let's start with the top level principle of large program... Read more →

Yet another bad example of using or mis-using the waterfall paradigm

Through twitter I came across this chapter in Dean Leffingwell's book Scaling Software Agility. This is another example of poor references to old processes and the mis-understanding of how software development processes work in domains (possibly) outside ones own experience.... Read more →

What IT Can Learn From Defense and Space

Mary Poppendieck has a post about lean software development describing a typical software development process - at least from her experience. I'd like to describe how software is developed in domain I work.Mary's post, while informative is one of those... Read more →

Why Microsoft Project will eventually lose its base for professional users

I'm a power user of Microsoft Project. We work programs with 10's of 1,000's of activities in an Integrated Master Schedule. We use Microsoft Project for most of these programs because that's what the government customer wants us to use.... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Emergent Design

A key role for the systems engineering effort on a complex project is to manage the emergent properties of the design leading to an optimum design. This paper examines issues related to the management of the emergent properties of the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Life is pain, highness. Any one saying differently is selling something. - Wesley, The Princes Bride. Read more →

Quote of the Day

No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I... Read more →

Planning Horizon and Error Bands

There is a great blog with two very powerful pictures about planning, estimating, and revising those estimates. Let's start with the classic picture of forecasting the future. This is similar to the weather track for hurricanes that is often used.... Read more →

A rational voice in the sea of noise about agile development

Alan Shalloway made a post to the [leandevelopment] forum that resonanted with me. The people aspects of development are more important than anything. That being said, there are rules (of the nature of soft dev) that people need to know.... Read more →

Alert - Robert Glass Book

Robert Glass's book Software Conflict 2.0 is a collection of essays about the art and science of developing software for money. In my domain software is a critical success for the safety and mission assurance of the products. Agile development... Read more →

30 year old software updates

Saw this "sources sought" post for software I worked on the 80's in FORTRAN 77 - a real programming langauge, where desk checking the code required several days, none of this throwing stuff on the wall to see if it... Read more →

Dynamic Systems

In several management and agile software development books there is mention of "complex adaptive systems," " chaotic systems," and "evolutionary systems". "Most books and articles in the field of complexity are either highly technical and readable only by specialist, or... Read more →