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Risk management

Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (Part II)

July 11, 2013 1 Comment
Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (Part II)

[Part I is here.] In my previous post, I talked about the use of metrics in IT project management and the three qualities of an ideal metric: informative and preferably predictive, objective, and automated. The ideal set of metrics would tell you when your IT project is going to ship; these metrics would give you […]

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Weighing in on Project Orca

November 10, 2012 3 Comments
Weighing in on Project Orca

[Cross posted from And Still I Persist] [Note: I am currently in transit from Colorado to Florida and am composing this post as I have time and ‘net access.] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s […]

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“Ground-truth documents”

September 12, 2012 2 Comments
“Ground-truth documents”

A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its […]

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With apologies to HP and Microsoft

February 21, 2011 3 Comments
With apologies to HP and Microsoft

Well, first, apologies to all you who have been waiting for me to resume posting here. Your wait is over; I will be a bit more frequent in the future. Second, I have chronicled here my problems with two HP systems — a desktop and a laptop — that I each purchased new, with Windows […]

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HP and Windows 7: a bad mix?

July 21, 2010 1 Comment
HP and Windows 7: a bad mix?

[UPDATE:  Read this post, which seems to be having trouble actually appearing here on the blog.] Since last November, I have bought three new, out-of-the-box systems preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit  (and upgraded to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit at the end of May): an HP Pavilion e9237c desktop (quad-core 64-bit  processor, 8 GB […]

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