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Why is software project estimation so often wrong?

July 11, 2013 1 Comment
Why is software project estimation so often wrong?

Thanks to Michael Swain (via a Facebook post), I ran across this explanation of why software projects are so often underestimated: Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I’ll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast: The line […]

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Weighing in on Project Orca

November 10, 2012 0 Comments
Weighing in on Project Orca

Cross posted from And Still I Persist] [Note: I am currently in transit from Colorado to Florida and am composing this post as I have time and ‘net access.] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s […]

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Fireflies, conveyor belts, and landfill

March 4, 2009 0 Comments
Fireflies, conveyor belts, and landfill

My newest Baseline column is up, and in it, I talk about technology lifecycles that can cause you grief: Each technology is on its own product lifecycle, which may or may not match with your organization’s business and development lifecycles. In particular, there are certain cycle mismatch patterns that commonly occur in organizations looking to […]

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Two new Baseline columns up

September 24, 2008 0 Comments
Two new Baseline columns up

The first column, “Second Class Software Quality for Major IT Projects”, talks about the curious fact that organizations are willing to spend millions, tens of millions, even hundred of millions of dollars on major IT project and yet still nickle-and-dime their software quality assurance (SQA) effort. It doesn’t help that SQA personnel are pretty much […]

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Buy vs. Build — the eternal dilemma

August 29, 2008 0 Comments
Buy vs. Build — the eternal dilemma

If it’s Friday, it must be another Baseline column. This one talks about the issues surrounding whether to build or buy software: The other day, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he’s working. The corporation has a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The set of […]

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