bliki tagged by: metrics
CannotMeasureProductivity
We see so much emotional discussion about software process, design practices and the like. Many of these arguments are impossible to resolve because the software industry lacks the ability to measure some of the basic elements of the effectiveness of software development. In particular we have no way of reasonably measuring productivity.
29 August 2003
FivePoundBag
You can't put ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag
-- Anyone who has tried
When Kent and I wrote Planning Extreme Programming, we included this whimsical quote to help get the essence of what planning is about.
13 October 2005
StandardStoryPoints
I've heard a couple of questions recently about coming up with a standard story point mechanism for multiple teams using extreme programming's planning approach. The hope is have several teams all using equivalent story points, so that three story points of effort on one team is the same as on another.
6 September 2004
EstimatedInterest
TechnicalDebt is a very useful concept, but it raises the question of how do you measure it? Sadly technical debt isn't like financial debt, so it's not easy to tell how far you are in hock (although we seem to have had some trouble with measuring the financial kind recently).
10 December 2008
RigorousAgile
I often run into a complaint that agile methods don't have a rigorous definition. The complainer may talk about how this means that you can't tell if a particular team is using an agile method or not. They may also say that this makes it hard to teach people how to do agile methods - what's the curriculum?
29 May 2005
WhatIsFailure
CHAOS report says only 34% of projects succeed.
The Standish Group's CHAOS report has been talking of billions of wasted dollars on IT projects for many years. The 34% success rate is actually a improvement over 2001's figure of 28%. But what do we really mean by 'failure'?
15 May 2003