Waltzing With Bears
Any software project that's worth starting will be vulnerable to risk. Since greater risks bring greater rewards, a company that runs away from risk will soon find itself lagging behind its more adventurous competition. By ignoring the threat of negative outcomes---in the name of positive thinking or a Can-Do attitude---software managers drive their organizations into the ground. In Waltzing with Bears, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister---the best-selling authors of Peopleware---show readers how to identify and embrace worthwhile risks. Developers are then set free to push the limits. You'll find that risk management makes aggressive risk-taking possible; protects management from getting blindsided; provides minimum-cost downside protection; reveals invisible transfers of responsibility; isolates the failure of a subproject---readers are taught to identify the most common risks faced by software projects: schedule flaws; requirements inflation; turnover; specification breakdown; and under-performance. Packed with provocative insights, real-world examples, and project-saving tips, Waltzing with Bears is your guide to mitigating the risks---before they turn into problems.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
17mentions
11people
2008–2024years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed."
I believe Barry boehm is on record stating that the biggest mistake he made in designing a software creation process was believing people who told him that you could get firm requirements up front.
So yes, if you're in that rare case where you can start out with clear and non-contradictory requirements, probably anything you do is going to succeed better than when you don't.
There's a good book on risk management that goes into this more, Waltzing With Bears, by Demarco and Lister
- I love Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects. But it's 20 years old now. Is there a more modern book that helps to explain to software teams all the risks inherent in software projects and gives advice on how to avoid them? e.g. scope creep?
- Tom DeMarco describes a method in Waltzing With Bears that's quite interesting: use a triangle defined by the three points as a rough approximation for the probability distribution, and then cumulative distribution function calculations are just juggling quadratics that you can plug into Excel.
Mind you, these days Excel's got the distribution function formulae in it that you'd need to do it "properly" with a lognormal distribution, but I like the way the three estimation points have a direct and obvious link to the result with the triangle method.
- Some other books I can recommend to read alongside McConnell's are Waltzing With Bears by DeMarco and Lister (of Peopleware fame) and How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard.
- The relevant book for this is Measuring and Managing Information Risk: A FAIR Approach by Freund and Jones[0].
Both books are worth reading; Hubbard's influence on FAIR is noticeable and positive. FAIR has the advantage that it comes with a fairly built-out ontology for assembling data or estimates. The OP touches on the top level (Loss Event Magnitude and Loss Event Frequency), but the ontology goes quite deep and can be used at multiple levels of detail.
The calculations are not difficult, I've implemented them twice in proofs-of-concept, including one that produces pretty charts.
The difficult part, to be honest, is that developing good estimates is difficult and frequently uncomfortable and the gains are not easily internalised.
Additionally, serious tool support is lacking in the places where it would make a difference -- issue trackers, for example.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Information-Risk-A...
edit -- Another good book in this area is Waltzing with Bears by DeMarco & Lister. A short, funny, insightful read, as you'd expect from the authors of PeopleWare: https://www.amazon.com/Waltzing-Bears-Managing-Software-Proj...
- Waltzing With Bears. Oh my god how I wish I had read that one book.
