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Risk management

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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RISE: The Mythical Man-Month (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 1975/1995)

June 4, 2012 6 Comments
RISE: <b>The Mythical Man-Month</b> (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 1975/1995)

[The second in a series of posts on Readings in Software Engineering. Previous post: The Psychology of Computer Programming, Gerald M. Weinberg (1971/1998)] The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA, 1975. Softbound, 195 pages. Personal acquisition date: unknown. Original edition out of print. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays […]

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But, wait! (More on SSDs and e-discovery)

March 1, 2011 0 Comments
But, wait! (More on SSDs and e-discovery)

OK, just last week I wrote a post on a report out of UCSD regarding difficulties in erasing data from solid-state disks (SSDs). But now out of Australia comes a somewhat contradictory report that some SSDs actually erase ‘slack’ (unused) space themselves without any user or system intervention — and, furthermore, that they can do […]

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E-discovery and solid-state drives (SSDs)

February 24, 2011 1 Comment
E-discovery and solid-state drives (SSDs)

E-discovery — the recovery, analysis, and production of evidence stored in digital form on various media — has become a major issue in litigation because of how much data simple devices can hold and the resulting duplication and multiplication of documents, files, and other digital types of evidence. Because of the risks and costs of […]

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