Herding Cats

What Software Development Models Aren't Iterative and Incremental?

Use of the dreaded Waterfall model is a stalking horse for agilest and #Noestimates advocates for the evils of software development guided by any Governance processes intending to be the steward of other people's money. If it's your own money... Read more →

Incremental Commitment Spiral Model

The Incremental Commit Spiral Model provides an iterative and incremental framework for complex software intensive system of systems. This model has it's roots in the Iterative and Incremental Development (IID) methods in use since the mid-1970's. It's a popular misconception... Read more →

The Classic Misunderstanding between Principles, Practices, and Process

A recent Twitter post make the false claim that. I won't embarrass the OP, since he seems to delight in making such unsubstituted claims. As an early user of (a FORTRAN 77 developer on Software Intensive System of Systems for... Read more →

More Reuse of Established Terms to Mean New Things

The #NoEstimates Manifesto - Actually restates Best Practice for estimating and making decisions with those estimates. Probabilistic Over Deterministic All project work is uncertain Uncertainty comes in only two forms Aleatory (Irreducible) - statistical variations, which can only be handled... Read more →

Quote of the Day

You may be successfull, but not with this plan - Senior Manager, Intelligence Commuity, Agency at Joint Space Cost Council meeting Read more →

Quote of the Day

If you make serious allegation or claim and don't have serious evidence, no one is going to take you seriously When #Noestimates advocates make conjectures that decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimating the impact of... Read more →

Quote of the Day - #NoEstimates is a Fallacy

Thus Peirce conjectured that the world was not only ruled by the strict Newtonian laws, but that it was also at the same time ruled by laws of chance, or of randomness, or of disorder: by laws of statistical probability.... Read more →

Quote of the Day

‘‘Bill James had a great line,’’ Tom Tango, the senior database architect of stats for MLB Advanced Media, told me. (If James is largely considered the godfather of sabermetrics, Tango could be its Michael Corleone.) ‘‘If you have a metric... Read more →

Quote of the Day

If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer: “He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.” -... Read more →

The Flaw of Average (Mean) and Its Cousin Mode and Median

It's become the mantra of some in agile development community recently to count stories and stop counting Story Points. While Story Points are Ordinal numbers and have several flaws at their core, counting Stories alone, without some supporting statistics is... Read more →

Principle Based Management

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is. If it disagrees with Principles, it’s wrong. - Richard Feynman In that simple statement is the key to Principle Based Management of Other People’s money. † Most business departments have a set... Read more →

Governance

Governance is about decision rights. Notions of self-organizing teams, self-direction, self-management need to be established inside a governance framework. When you hear about any process where management is NOT involved, ask first who's money are they spending? Read more →

Quote of the Day

Since the Integration of this complicated expression (70.1) is straightforward, we shall not include it here Read more →

Building the "Perfect" Schedule

I'm working on a presentation and discussion for the Joint Space Cost Council that is happening in September. Our topic is about the integration of multiple IPT (Integrated Product Teams) and how to coordinate all the work into an Integrated... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Common sense has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively, it seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful projects is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around - Steve Jobs This is the User Experience point of view for software development. It is also the Capabilities Based... Read more →

Quote of the Day

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is but the world as it will be. — Isaac Asimov This as it will be world, requires making estimates, since that... Read more →

Good Reason to Have Lots of Bad Ideas

There is a column in the August 24th issue of Nature speaking about having bad ideas that turn into good ideas. The column was directed to the scientist, and how science is all about sorting the wheat from the chaff.... Read more →

Quote of the Day

On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I may not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could... Read more →

The Seven Deadly Sins of Project Management

Mike Cohn, one of my favorite blogger's and author's, made a post awhile back about Agile and the Seven Deadly Sins of Project Management. With some posts this week on twitter about not needing project management or estimates to be... Read more →