Herding Cats

What Do We Mean by Risk and Uncertainty?

Risk and Uncertainty are an integral part of all decision-making processes for non-trivial work. The decision-making process involves a set of actions and outcomes, each of which associated with them a probability or a statistical process. All risk comes from... Read more →

Lessons Learned from the Columbia Disaster (Update)

This week I taught a 4-day course on Progressive Concepts in Program Management at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. One of the workshops used the NASA Columbia accident as an example (NASA report calls these things mishaps). This... Read more →

Microeconomics and Risk Management in Decision Making for Software Development

Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations. Economics has two basis branches: Macroeconomics is... Read more →

Monte Carlo Simulation

There was a tweet yesterday ... In casinos, the betting rules ensure the house wins (Eliminates Risk) over time This, of course, is not true, nor is it how casinos work. Let's start with a brief overview of Monte Carlo... Read more →

The Economics of Decision Making on Software Projects

The classic paper “Software Engineering Economics,” Barry Boehm, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol SE-10(1), 1984, pp. 4-21. opens with a dictionary definition of economics as a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production distribution, and... Read more →

Project Success Means Knowing ...

To increase the Probability of Project success we have to know something about the attributes and measures of the Five Immutable Principles that enable this success, while managing in the presence of uncertainty All engineering projects, including software projects, are... Read more →

Estimates, Forecasts, Projections (Update)

There is the misuse of the terms of statistics and probability in many domains. Politics being one. The #Noestimates advocates are another of the most prolific abusers of these terms. Here are the mathematical definitions. Not Wikipedia definitions. Not the... Read more →

Making Decisions in the Presence of Uncertainty

All project work is uncertain. This uncertainty comes in two forms - Aleatory and Epistemic. Aleatory Uncertainty is irreducible, Epistemic uncertainty is reducible. More can be found on this in Both Aleatory and Epistemic Uncertainty Create Risk. But now what... Read more →

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 →

Decision Making Means Making Inferences

In software development, we almost always encounter situations where a decision must be made when we are uncertain what the outcome might or even the uncertainty in data used to make that decision. Decision making in the presence of uncertainty... Read more →

Managing in the Presence of Uncertainty

A Tweet caught my eye this weekend Before moving to risk let's look at what Agile is Agile development is a phrase used in software development to describe methodologies for incremental software development. Agile development is an alternative to traditional... Read more →

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

When we encounter simple answers to complex problems, we need to not only be skeptical, we need to think twice about the credibility of the person posing the solution. A recent example is: The cost of software is not directly... Read more →

All The World's A Random Process

When we hear about making decisions in the absence of estimates of the impact from that decision, the cost of making that decision - the opportunity cost, which is the basis of Microeconomics, or best of all the possible alternatives... Read more →

Decision Making in the Presence of Uncertainty

Decision theory is concerned with the problem of making decisions. Statistical decision theory is decision making in the presence of statistical knowledge, by understanding some of the uncertainties involved in the problem. Decision theory deals with the situations where decisions... Read more →

Closed Loop Control

Writing software for money is a Closed Loop Control System. The Reference is our needed performance - cost, schedule, and technical - to achieve the project's goals. These goals include providing the needed business value, at the needed cost, on... Read more →

Making Choices in the Absence of Information

Decision making in the presence of uncertainty is a normal business function as well as a normal technical development process. The world is full of uncertainty. Those seeking certainty will be woefully disappointed. Those conjecturing that decisions can't be made... Read more →

Elements of Project Success

There are three key elements of every project on the planet - Cost, Schedule, and the performance of the product or service produced by the project. Each of these has drivers. The connections between Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance are... Read more →

Uncertainty is the Source of Risk

No risk exists alone, it is the uncertainty of an unfavorable outcome that creates risk Aleatory Uncertainty produces Aleatory Risk. Epistemic Uncertainty produces Epistemic Risk. Iin both cases it is the UNCERTAINTY that is the source of the Risk. Risks... Read more →