Remove Controlling Remove Estimate Remove Governance Remove Software Engineering
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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.

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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
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Economics of Software Development

Herding Cats

This is the foundation for estimates. Estimates with accuracy and precision values needed to make credible decisions. These estimates are critical to both developers and customers. These estimates are used for generating requests for proposals, contract negotiations, scheduling, monitoring, and control.

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Cone of Uncertainty Bibliography

Herding Cats

I work in a domain where the CoU is baked into the Integrated Program Performance Management (IPPM) processes flowed down from the buyer, in this case, the Federal Government. This can be the confidence in the estimate for any variable. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management , 57 (4), pp. IN this case Mean Time To Failure.

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Start with Principles, Not Personal Anecdotes

Herding Cats

I've seen estimates abused by bad managers, so let's NOT estimate and that will fix the behavior of Bad Managers." While the human behaviors are real and observable, conjecturing that decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimating the outcome of those decisions, there is no principle to support that conjecture.

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The Fallacy of Wild Numbers

Herding Cats

DeMacro made this post, which has been picked up by the agile community to mean estimating is a waste. . Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect, maybe the most important, of any software project. For example in "Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?"

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Two Parallel Processes of Project Success - Both Value and Delivery are Needed

Herding Cats

For software development, those scarce resources are people, time, and money. Software engineering economics is a topic that addresses the elements of software project costs estimation and analysis and project benefit-cost ratio analysis. This is the foundation for estimates. Related articles.

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