As business professionals, we need to understand that security is everyone’s responsibility; and that is especially true for business analysts, project managers, systems analysts, and others in the position of defining processes, technical architecture, or decision support. If you are involved in a project that deals with information business assets, then you need to be thinking about the confidentiality and integrity of those assets throughout your project. There are questions you need to be asking yourself, as well as others on the project, to better understand the security implications of a particular process, technology, or design element of that project.
The ultimate management sin is to waste people’s time, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister told us in their famous book Peopleware [1]. This includes having pointless meetings that prevent people from actually doing anything useful. Nevertheless, some meetings are considered a necessary evil and therefore the so-called “agile movement” in software development has come up with an efficient way of dealing with this: the Stand-up Meeting in 15 Minutes. For those who have just woken up from ten years of hibernation, or having emerged from a cave that had no Internet access, I will explain this briefly.
A stand-up meeting is a daily meeting where people remain standing up to keep the duration of the meeting under 15 minutes. Teams use these meetings to answer three simple questions..
Software production has become one of the key activities of the industrialized world. Software applications are now the driving force of business, government operations, military equipment, and most of the services that we take for granted: electric power, water supplies, telephones, and transportation. Most major companies and government agencies build or commission new software applications every year. But software development and software contracts have been very troublesome. Cost and schedule overruns are common, and litigation for software problems is a frequent outcome. Successful development of large software projects is so difficult that significant percentage of large systems greater than 10,000 function points are canceled and never completed. One of the major challenges of software cost and schedule estimation is “sizing” or predicting the amount of source code and other deliverables that must be built to satisfy the requirements of a software application. Sizing is a critical precursor to software cost estimating whether estimation is done manually or by means of a commercial software cost estimating tool. For software applications that are similar to existing applications, size can be derived by analogy to the existing packages. When the software application is a new kind of application then sizing by analogy is not a feasible approach. For much of the history of the software industry, sizing was considered a very difficult and intractable problem. Sizing is still difficult, but over the past 30 years an interesting new methodology for dealing with size prediction has been developed based on the use of the function point metric. This new methodology has the advantage that it can not only predict the volume of source code, but also the volumes of planning documents, specifications, user manuals, test cases, and even the probable number of errors or bugs that might be encountered.
Author: Capers Jones is the President of Capers Jones & Associates LLC. He is also the founder and former chairman of Software Productivity Research, LLC (SPR), where he holds the title of Chief Scientist Emeritus. He is a well-known author and international public speaker, and has authored the books “Patterns of Software Systems Failure and Success,” “Applied Software Measurement,” “Software Quality: Analysis and Guidelines for Success,” “Software Cost Estimation,” and “Software Assessments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices.” Jones and his colleagues from SPR have collected historical data from more than 600 corporations and more than 30 government organizations. This historical data is a key resource for judging the effectiveness of software process improvement methods. The total volume of projects studied now exceeds 12,000.
Copyright * 2008 by Capers Jones & Associates LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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