Herding Cats

Fallacy of the Week - Use and Misuse of Goodhart's Law

Goodhart's Law states when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it. Without a Macro Economics context, the Law is... Read more →

Darwinian Truth and Reality in Software Development Management

Jordan Peterson put forth the idea that “empirical” truth (e.g. the Earth is a sphere) is all well and good, but if that truth runs contrary to information that will allow you to spread your genes then it stops being... Read more →

DDSTOP The Saga Continues

There's been a rash of conjectures about all kinds of bad business, project, and software development (agile and traditional) management ideas of late. Time to update the Don't Do Stupid Things on Purpose (DDSTOP) post. “There’s nothing more dangerous than... 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

I know not why I am so sad - Antonio, at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice Our brains have been designed from evolution to make calculations about possible futures. This is called deciding. When this deciding takes place... Read more →

The Fallacy of #NoEstimates

There is a Blog Video speaking the #NoEstimates that opens with the following. Let's look at the credibility of each of the statements below: Estimating can be an endemic problem in organisations these days because estimating is fundamentally guessing, yet... Read more →

Value, Cost and Business Decision Making

In Software Value of something is totally unrelated to Cost This is a popular fallacy in the #Noestimates advocates vocabulary. Let's look at the principles of cost, price, and value to the customer from the point of view of the... Read more →

Modeling the Future Using Empirical Data from the Past

This is a quote from Twitter today that says Various projective practices upon trending have been used to forecast progress ... These have proven useful. However, these do not replace the importance of empiricism. In complex environments, what will happen... Read more →

Antifragile, Macro and Micro Economics and the Misuse of Terms (Again)

The Buzz Word Anti-fragile is tossed around lately by #NoEstimates advocates claiming that making estimate creates fragility to the work. Let's start with a definition of anti-fragile ... Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to... Read more →

Fallacy of the Day

"On spec" is open loop control on value. Project Controls are Management Actions, either preplanned to achieve the desired result, or taken as a corrective measure prompted by the monitoring process. Project controls are concerned with the metrics of the... Read more →

Fallacy of the Day

Requirements, as traditionally used, are a separation tool. To separate the "thinkers" from the "doers". In software this is a HUGE mistake! This conjecture is a fallacy. The purpose of requirements elicitation, use, and implementation of the requirement that result... Read more →

The Premises of Rational Management

Organizational Effectiveness is a basis of rational management. The organization is one of mankind's all-time greatest inventions. An organization is intended to operate as one unit, with all its parts in efficient coordination. But all too often it does not.... Read more →

Logically Fallacious Friday

Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb - Thomas More, Utopia The Fallacy - We can't know much of anything about the Future. But in fact, the future is... Read more →