We will continue our review of CMMI and requirements management practices.  As we have seen in the earlier posts, managing the requirements is necessary for efficient development and doing so has positive impacts on the project as well.  Specifically, the project benefits when the organization stands behind attaining the requirements, and is in for a […]

If commitment to the requirements is a significant source of failure, it is followed close behind by the management of changes or additional requirements that come from doing the work.  Though many project managers may believe that once a project is underway, there shall be no changes; that is a myopic approach.  Change happens.  As […]

Continuous Deliver and Embedded Automotive I have worked on projects that employed continuous delivery for embedded products. The embedded product was an automotive component.  The core of the software (the operating system) was specified using conventional approach. This operating system consisted of the maximum model requirements for this globally used component. The component looked and […]

Project Closure and Team Disband One of my favorites and often poorly executed part of a project is the project closure.  Project closure is not just a simple wipe our hands together and smile, then proclaim that we are finished with the project. It is not even handing the customer our results and patting everybody […]

Imagine, a story based on true events. This is not John Lennon’s Imagine.  Imagine you are an executive and you are sitting down to your early morning breakfast with the daily paper.  As you read the paper, you find an article about your company and you are stunned.  The article is not a flattering article […]

Onboarding Defined First, we should probably explain or define onboarding.  Onboarding is the collection of activities associated with our present staff socializing and training our newly acquired talent.  The older employees take time out of their day to demonstrate behaviors and pass on specific knowledge and skills. Onboarding New Hires Recently a person that I […]

We can use a decision matrix to help determine  the best test strategy.  In this instance, the decision matrix is comparing what we believe to be vehicle testing success criterion (such as the fidelity of the test results and ability to duplicate, the speed at which we can test and meeting critical dependencies) against a number of […]

First of all, I hate the word human resources for our employees.  This verbiage starts the discussion as if people were fungible.  That people, their talents, aspirations, motivation and capability are identical. That is simply not true.  I just got out of a discussion with a company that left me feeling hopeful.  After working in […]