Herding Cats

Decision Making in the Presence of Uncertainty

There's another rash of Twitter posters supporting the conjecture that decisions can be made about how to spend other people's money without estimating the impact and outcome of that decision. This is a core premise of #NoEstimates from the Original... Read more →

#NoEstimates Book Review - Part 1

I've started reading Vasco's book #NoEstimates and will write a detailed deconstruction. I got the Kindle version, so I have a $10 investment at risk. Let's start with some graphs that have been around and their misinformation that forms the... Read more →

Control, Stability, Short Term, Long Term all needed for Success

When riding a single track like this one behind our neighborhood, I came to understand the tradeoffs between stability and control. In our conference sessions, we speak about how the Wright Brothers learned this concept as well. Here's another trail... Read more →

Quick Summary of Estimating Advice

There's lots of misinformation going around again in the #NoEstimates community We can't estimate things we've never done before - this is simply not true. There is not much that hasn't been done before in some form. If you truly... Read more →

Deconstructing a #NoEstimates Argument

Here's a recent presentation on using #Noestimates. Let's deconstruct these ideas in light of several principles and practices of making decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Planning with #NoEstimates from Gil Zilberfeld Let's start with the title Planning with #NoEstimates.... Read more →

Software Development Process Improvement Opportunities

When we hear about all the suggested ways to improve the effectiveness of our development effort, if we're to going work on improvements, let's go where the REAL money is. Here's the IT budget for the Federal Government. This is... Read more →

Deadlines Require Time and Care For Success

The latest thread in agile is ... the continued paradigm of deadline-driven development is killing the benefits that Agile Software Development can bring. It is suggested by Neil Killick that ... ... using genuine time constraints as a factor in... Read more →

Software Economics

Here's some thoughts on the economics of software development using other people's money, after 3 weeks of working a proposal for a major software intensive system of systems using Agile. With the advent of Agile, the linear spend planning and... Read more →

Misquotes of Deming

It's common to misquote famous quotes. The #NoEstimates advocates love to use a Deming quote It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth. This is used in support of... Read more →