Software Engineering and Project Management: Ad Hoc Stories

Software Engineering and Project Management

Ad Hoc Stories

Mohammed S. Makhlouf – IS Department,4th year

Our Key Witnesses

• Fredrick P. Brooks• Steve Jobs• Sarah Winchester• Jack Welch• Jacob Nielsen

Lack of planning

• Winchester Mystery House

Lack of planning

• Planning is some how a design problem,

And

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve Jobs

Projects usually become late

• Even if your estimates are so accurate you’re only half done.

• Projects do get late for one reason or another so hustle hard.

• Never Add man power to late projects.

They only get later !

Fredrick P. Brooks

Communication

Tower of Babel

One big Failure … in Italian it is a fiasco

Methodologies and Details

• “Too Often we measure everything and understand nothing.”

Jack Welch

Time and Attention are Finite!

Methodology

Methodology

Cut FeaturesBe realistic about what you really need and what is actually usable.

Use it or just try it

• “Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.”

• “Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.”

Jacob Nielsen

Code and Documentation• Should be fully related and not just a heap of

papers.

So what to do

For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

Fail Fast.

Iterate.

Explore.

This isn’t construction or rocket science.

Insanity

• The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

• So please don’t repeat these age old problems

Thank you, thank you, thank you

You are all far too kind