Herding Cats

Don't Be Fooled

This is a new Category on Herding Cats that comes from my finishing of the book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, Gary Smith. Of late I've encountered many people on the web... Read more →

Classification of Different Types of Uncertainty

From "Facets of Uncertainty: Epistemic Uncertainty, non-Stationarity, Likelihood, Hypothesis Testing, and Communication," Keith Beven, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Volume 61, No. 9, pp. 1625-1665. Type of uncertainty Description Aleatory Uncertainty with stationary statistical characteristics. May be structured (bias, autocorrelation, long-term persistence)... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Probabilities are nothing but common sense reduced to calculation - Pierre-Simon LaPlace We should be cautious about calculating without thinking. Calculations are the easy part. The thinking is the hard part. The important question is whether the calculations make sense.... Read more →

Five Immutable Principles of Project Success

Project failure starts when we can’t tell what “done” looks like in any meaningful way. Without some agreement on our vision of “done”, we’ll never recognize it when it arrives, except when we’ve run out of time or money or... Read more →

Missing Critical Thinking

It's true that many projects fail for a variety of reasons. Here's some in our domain. Similar causes of failure can be found in other domains. But when there's a claim about software project failures AND there are no root... Read more →

Book of the Month

The standard way of thinking about decisions is backward, says Ralph Keeney: People focus first on identifying alternatives rather than on articulating values. A problem arises and people react, placing the emphasis on mechanics and fixed choices instead of the... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Sample Errors

Observational studies are inherently challenging because of the potential for self-selection bias and confounding factors. Always be wary of studies the use the data to discover the theory. - Standardd Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Don't Be Fooled

Provocative assertions are provactive precisely because they are counterintuitive - which is a very good reason for skepticism. When you hear such an assertation, don't be easily persuaded that you are wrong. It may well be that the provocative assertation... Read more →

Quote of the Day - The Systems Approach

The systems approach is a technique for the application of a scientific approach to complex problems. It concentrates on the analysis and design of the whole, as distinct from the components or the parts. It insists upon looking at a... Read more →

Monte Carlo Simulation

Estimation is part of project management. The most important estimates for the project manager are related to time and cost. And remember you're High School Economics class - The Value of something cannot be determined alone, you need to know... Read more →

Quote of the Day

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope wth them,... Read more →

Is There an Underlying Theory of Software Project Management?

Here's a paper that has been under constant development for several years now and is headed to a Journal and part of an upcoming book chapter. The motivation for the paper started when there were claims made the somehow agile... Read more →

Beyond Budgeting

It's popular in the agile community and especialy the #NoEstimates community to consider Beyond Budgeting to mean No Budgeting. Here are the actual principles of Beyond Budgeting Governance and Transparency Values - Bind people to a common cause; not a... Read more →

Quote of the Day

If we can compute probability on a satellite that’s never flown before, we can compute project success in IT - Douglas Hubbard IT does have a repeatable history, and if you’re not willing to include that in your analysis, you... Read more →

Quote of the Day

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. — Misquoted from Plato (actual author not known) But this is still a good quote... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Mystery and Ignorance are always coexistent. Learn the truth and mystery will disappear. There are mysteries to managing in the presence of uncertainty for those who understand the principles of Risk Management of cost, schedule, and technical performance and know... Read more →

Mathematics for Engineering and Software Development

When we encounter engineering problems that are beyond the de minimis category, they usually involve some form of mathematics. Probability, Statistics, Measurements, Calculus and the like. Here's a collection of downloadable books that can be the resources needed to address... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Logic will never change emotion or perception - Edward de Bono I belong to a community of Debunker’s of bad project management and software development processes, dedicated to exposing the myths and misconceptions of good project management and software development... Read more →

Quote of the Day

My words will either attract a strong mind or offend a weak one - The Minds Journal Read more →

Quote of the Day

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. ~ C.G. Jung Read more →