Remove Engineering Remove Estimate Remove Governance Remove Software Engineering
article thumbnail

Is Software Development Art or Engineering

Herding Cats

I started my career as a Software Engineer , writing Fortran 77 signal processing algorithms to find and track missile launchers in the middle eastern desert. Signal processing is a domain of software development well suited to the paradigm of engineered systems. This is called engineering the solution.

article thumbnail

4 Fallacious Reasons to Estimate and Why Those Are Fallacious

Herding Cats

There's a recent post titled Four Fallacious Reasons to Estimate. It lists the usual suspects for why those spending the money think they don't have to estimate how much they plan to spend when they'll be done producing the value they've been assigned to produce for that expenditure. Let's look at each one in more detail.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Reading List for the Cone of Uncertainty

Herding Cats

The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a project’s targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them ? 10 Deadly Sins of Software Estimation , Steve McConnell , Construx, 2002. Steve McConnell.

2012 48
article thumbnail

Misunderstanding Making Decisions in the Presence of Uncertainty

Herding Cats

What happens if you shift focus from "accurate estimation" to "reliably shipping by a date"? . If your project has no uncertainty, there is no need to estimate. All estimates have precision and accuracy. Deciding how much precision and accuracy is needed for a credible estimate is critical to the success of that decision.

2003 46
article thumbnail

How to Estimate Any Software Problem

Herding Cats

ways to make decisions with No Estimates. can we make a decision in the presence of Uncertainty without making an estimate of the impact or outcome of that decision? What would be the evidence that we could make decisions in the presence of uncertanty without estimating the impacts and outcomes of those decisions? . Start here.

article thumbnail

There is Little New Under the Sun

Herding Cats

It is popular to claim we've never done this before, so how can we possibly estimate the cost and schedule. If it truly hasn't been done before, then the software project is likely to be an inventing new physics project. In that world, we still made estimates of the cost to design, build, and operate the experiment.

article thumbnail

Webinar Recap: Project Performance Measurement – Part 2: What to Measure and How to Report

MPUG

And then because I did not, I guess, mess up my last job, I was a team member then a team lead, then a section lead, then a project manager, then a program manager, then a director of engineering, and moved up the chain not by formal education, but more because I didn’t screw up my last job, so they figured they could keep putting me up there.