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 […]
Have you ever watched Air Disasters television show? If you have then you see that all too often the reason for the disaster is a series of events that lead to a disaster. Some of these miss-steps are quite small, but when added to the other miss-steps, ends up in disaster. This is often the […]
I am writing this post after a discussion with some people on product development and project management processes. The discussion took a turn to process intensive approach or not to use a defined process. There are many ideas of how this can work, for example the Capability Maturity Model Integration is an example of the […]
When we discuss risk in project management circles, we often discuss it in terms of severity and probability. There is much more to risk and how it impacts and the implications it may have on our project. Risk Probability and Severity As the saw goes, few things are certain, except death and taxes. The more […]
The Emissions Tango There is so much to learn from this case for those who develop products for a living and automotive products in particular. Understanding the impact of concept selection and testing of the product on the project’s success and product quality is important. The early decisions we make regarding the development of the […]
Regression Testing and Scope A brief exchange on twitter on the topic of regression testing leads me to this post. Twitter, is not the place to really discuss this topic as there are too few characters and there are many factors that go into determining the scope of regression test. Regression testing is the testing […]
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 […]
Optimism is a Kind of Blindness Perhaps it is because I have seen the word optimism abused that I say optimism is a kind of blindness. Optimism like hope is used to justify our limited planning and reduced talent. Through optimism, we encourage troops to charge across a field that will surely end in their […]
Poor Excuse for Not Automating Testing Recently I came across and participated in a social media exchange that proposed that automating product testing (software) was not helpful. Their assertion was backed with comments about personnel new to testing who cannot learn how to test. Testing and System Complexity System and software complexity, the number of […]
There are many ways for us to evaluate the project we have discussed the monetary evaluation techniques in our books. These business measurements provide us with mechanisms to assess the business viability of the product. There are also ways to evaluate the project strategy with decision-making tools like Pugh. In an earlier post we demonstrated […]