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 →

The Conscious Competence Learning Model

The Conscious Competence Learning Model has four stages. Each learner must pass through each stage to progress from incompetence to competence. This model is useful in understanding the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The four stages of competence are: [1] Unconscious incompetence. The... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The most unsuccessful three years in the education of cost estimators appears to be fifth-grade arithmetic - Norman R. Augustine, Law VIII Read more →

Book of the Month

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols. From the dust jacket - Thanks to technological advances and increasing levels of education we have access to more information than ever before. Yet rather... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“The winning general is the one who can best act on imperfect information and half-formed theories.” – Napoleon Bonaparte All decisions in the presence of uncertainty require making estimates of the reducible and irreducible uncertainties that create risk. Knowing the... Read more →

Quote of the Day (Ad Hominem)

Expose an Irrational Belief, keep a person rational for a day Expose Irrational Thinking, keep a person rational for a lifetime Dr. Bo Bennett, in Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of 300 Logical Fallacies Some in the agile community, when... Read more →

Software Estimating Processes and the Fallacy of the Week

I'm continually building the bibliography for our Software Intensive Systems of Systems work activities and found in "A review of Agile Software Effort Estimation Methods" It lists Traditional Methods Expert Judgement Analogy Price-to-Win, Bottom-Up, and Top-Up Wideband Delphi Algorithmic methods... Read more →

Quote of the Day

If we start with what we think is a valid number, we will tend to continue with that number. When in fact, we should speak only in terms of confidence intervals and probabilities of success - Sir Francis Bacon In... Read more →

The Saga Continues

In a recent post, the saga of No Estimates as a basis of spending other people's money continues. Let's start with the definition of No Estimates. Quit estimates cold turkey. Get some kind of first-stab working software into the customer's... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The Mastery of Risk distinguishes modern times from the past: By understanding and measuring risks and their consequences, modern humans no longer perceive the further as a whim of the Gods and thereby have been empowered to transform their world... 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 →

Return of the Swamp Monster (Standish Report)

Some #Noestimates advocates are heard quoting the Standish Report, reporting the non-data date that 60% of IT projects fail and of course that NOT ESTIMATING would have someone, by some means, through some magical force has saved these projects. And... 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 →

A Guide to Stopping #Noestimates Fallacies

Evaluating the evidence of good project management processes is critically important to both the developers, management and those paying for the software. These 12 points help separate the principles, practices, and processes from the pseudoscience, bad mathematics, willful ignorance of... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. – Winston Churchill The management of software development is fraught with risk: technical risk, market risk, requirements risk, and... Read more →

Increasing the Probability of Project Success (PoPS)

All project work, agile or traditional, operates in the presence of uncertainty. There are four fundamental root causes of Project or Program Failure, and their drivers that are addressed by Risk Management and the Estimating processes that go with them.... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain one's own or anyone else's - Justin Kruger and David Dunning, in "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The estimator’s charter is not to state what developers should do, but rather to provide a reasonable projection of what they will do. – T. DeMarco, Controlling Software Projects, Prentice Hall PTR, 1982. This quote is from the paper "Quantifying... Read more →

Start with the End in Mind

The notion - a fallacious notion - that done will emerge, is common in some circles of Agile and especially those agile advocates proferring No Estimates. The Greeks and Romans had a good understanding of most things we take for... Read more →