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Agile Supports Software Success
Agile posits this trade off: that creative projects, such as software development, have such huge market, technical and budget uncertainty, that we should pay the high expense of repeated regression testing, packaging, deployment, and rework, to enable us to test our market and technical theories early and often, adapting our approach as we learn more.…
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Forecasting without Historical Data
We can forecast even when no historical data exists, if we use our experience and judgment. In Part 1 of our probabilistic forecasting series we looked at how uncertainty is presented; in Part 2 we looked at how uncertainty is calculated. Both of those parts presumed historical data was available. Although estimating without historical data…
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Probabilistic Forecasting
In Part 1 of this series we discussed how probabilistic forecasting retains each estimate’s uncertainty throughout the forecast. We looked at how weather forecaster’s present uncertainty in their predictions and how people seem comfortable that the future cannot be predicted perfectly and life still continues. We need this realization in IT forecasts! In Part 2…
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Forecasting Defined
This is the first article in a series that will introduce alternative ways to forecast date, cost and staff needs for software projects. It is not a religious journey; we plan to discuss estimation and forecasting like adults and understand how and when different techniques are appropriate given context. Stakeholders often ask engineers to estimate…
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The Goal Revisited
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is a business novel that recounts how a factory manager shakes off complacency and isolation to save his factory and its employees. Many MBAs, system scientists and agilists have read it. I read The Goal 7 years ago. I was so excited I sent our CEO an email. “Have you read it? It has…
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Agile 2010 Impressions
Agile 2010 was held in Orlando near the Disney Epcot resort August 9 to 13. I focus on agile enterprises and attended many enterprise-focused talks. If you are interested in the developer focused view, Martin Fowler provides his thoughts here. My impressions follow. Portfolio management is being implemented in conjunction with quarterly “sprints” in other…
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Andy Warhol explains Incremental and Iterative Development
In any project, you should complete your your work in stages. This lets you show customers (those who pay) and users (who might not pay) your work in progress, to ensure you satisfy their initial expectations and adapt to new ones. You will likely stage your project incrementally or iteratively. Most people don’t know the…
