Had enough of arguing about agile? Concerned that software development has been side-tracked by religious war? Keen to inject an element of pragmatism, not to mention fact-based-ness into the debates? Perhaps what you need is a New Deal at http://www.the-new-deal.org
Tag: software quality
Project Success vs Project Value
Somehow earlier this year I subscribed to the chaos report email. Given the significant criticism of chaos report's measure of success - on time, on spec, on budget - I was amused by this week's email which poses the question whether their success criteria are relevant. What the Standish group does have that most of us don't, is access to a large number of (unpublished and hence unverifiable) examples.
From the email: "Which is more important project success or project value? It turns out the project success and project value is orthogonal or at right angles to each other. The harder you strive for perfect success the lower your project value. The harder you strive for greater values the lower the success rate.
We know this because we have coded each of the 50,000 projects within the CHAOS Database a success rate and value rate. Each rate has a score from 0 to 100. By grouping the projects by organization we can come up with a ranking by success and value. We then can compare the rankings. One of the items we discuss is another question Is the traditional triple Constraints (cost, time, and quality) measurement still appropriate?"
I'm surprised by the assertion that success and value are orthogonal. I'd have thought that there was at least some connection between time/cost/functionality and perceived value; if the value of your project is not in the spec, surely you wrote the wrong spec?
Software Architecture for Agile Developers – xp-manchester April 2013
A fine time was had by all ...
Software Quality — the Whole not the Parts
Ben Higginbottom makes a significant point right at the top of this question about the Knight Capital fiasco:
Was the Knight Capital fiasco related to Release Management? On August 1, 2012, Knight Capital Group had a very bad day, losing $440 million in forty-five minutes. More than two weeks later, there has been no official detailed explanation of ...
Ben Higginbottom: Nightmare scenarios like this are not the result in the failing in any one discrete components that can be 'fixed' simply and sweetly by improving the process, but by small failures in multiple domains (I'm kind of reminded of a fatal accident investigation). So coding error, gap in the unit testing, weak end to end testing and poor post release testing coupled with a lack of operational checks when live. I can understand the desire for a 'silver bullet' fix, but in any complex system I've never known them to exist.
Sometimes, it's the whole, not the parts, that needs fixing.