Following is a collection of 20 goals or targets for software engineering progress developed by Namcook Analytics LLC for the five years between 2014 and 2018. All of these goals are achievable in 2014 and in fact have already been achieved by a small selection of leading companies.
Unfortunately less than 5% of U.S. and global companies have achieved any of these goals, and less than 1% have achieved most of them. None of the author’s clients have achieved every goal. Continue reading
The structural methods used by the Rhode Island General Assembly for proposing and passing laws are chaotic and unprofessional.
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union (US), but the legislature proposes more bills than any other state including New York and California. The legislature is the most expensive in the United States. It is also one of the largest on a per-capita basis except for sparsely populated states such as Alaska. Perhaps 2,200 bills per year are proposed, but only a few hundred are passed. As a result, many bills are never even read before voting. Hundreds more bills are lost somewhere in committees for further study. Continue reading
There’s a lot we don’t yet know about this classic disaster, but nonetheless it is not too early to examine several obvious flaws in the approach. Top software professionals knew at the outset of various measures that would have saved a lot of expense and embarrassment, but were not applied. It seems clear this project was “managed” by comparative amateurs clearly not up to the management challenge. This effort did not fail for technical reasons – virtually all of the issues that have arisen were foreseeable and preventable. Continue reading
Hans Christian Anderson was on to something important and relevant to today’s risk environment … “Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes. He changed clothes almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people.” Probably you know the gist of this story – flim-flam artists convinced the Emperor an imaginary fabric was actually beautiful, at least until “A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage. “The Emperor is naked,” he said.” Continue reading
When applying Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), as in much else in life, the devil is in the details. The details are especially critical when attempting to apply standards such as ISO 31000 to software and IT intensive systems. ISO 31000 describes principles, a framework, and a high level process for ERM. ISO 31000 clause 5 identifies process steps – in this article I will focus on risk assessment and risk treatment as it applies to software and IT intensive contexts.