Comments and observations on Scrum

Sadly it is a well know fact: after 9 months you have finished your development project but it is not what your customer wanted or needed. Now you have to spend a lot of money and time fixing the product. Wouldn't it be nice to avoid the risk of not meeting your customers’ expectations? Scrum can help you! The more traditional methods like Rational (RUP) or Waterfall let you spend a lot of time on creating the best set of requirements. This can take a lot of effort but can still present you with the same problem: not meeting the...

The UML 2 Specification is Remarkably Well Written

Making good standards and specifications is not easy. Domain-experts who are involved in the creation of a specification have their own personal views and agendas. It is practically impossible to make everybody happy and there is an enormous risk of bloating a spec when designing “by committee”. Nevertheless, my esteem of the UML 2 specification (the “UML Superstructure” document of the OMG) is very high. Not that I don’t have any criticism - I will discuss that another time – however, I think the authors of the specification have done a remarkable job integrating a number of diagrammatic...

A succesful elicitation interview, a fluke or repeatable practice?

When it comes to interviewing, do business analysts really understand what they are doing?  

It’s one thing to say that business analysts are good at interviewing.  We have to be to do our jobs.  It’s another thing to say we understand what we are doing when we interview someone.  Despite the uniqueness of each situation there are still patterns that business analysts use and follow that we appear to be blissfully unaware of.

Whether you call it a knack, talent or skill, interviewing has repeatable techniques that we use over and over again.  The problem...

Why is training so important in an economic downturn?

As we reenter an era of budget cuts and every dollar spent has to have significant impact on the bottom line. With the limited availability of money to spend on resources it becomes extremely important to ensure that each resource is being used to its fullest extent, as effectively as possible, and with the best possible performance.

Why am I chasing a moving target?

If people are not ready in their decision making process to express to others what the problem is they want solved, the requirements engineer or business analyst has to lead them through a path of exploratory research to help finding them understanding their problem and help them to formulate their problem statement correctly. This exploratory research requires special strategies and techniques to help people through this problem identification process. If this is not recognized project teams sometimes use terms in despair like “Why can't my customers make up their mind?”

In other situations people understand very well...

The STP or Real-time Profile has Issues- Problem 1

OMG now offers a Real-time Embedded Systems professional certification (called OCRES). The certification exam subjects include such documents as the MDA Guide, the UML profile for Quality of Service and Fault Tolerance and the profile for Schedulability Performance and Time (abbreviated as SPT, but also often referred to as the Real-time profile). The SPT is the basis for other profiles; particularly, its chapter on resource modeling is referenced by several other specifications. There are two issues which I'll discuss in this and the following blog. First, the SPT is not based on the UML 2 specification but on...

The STP or Real-time Profile has Issues- Problem 2

The second problem with the STP (profile for Schedulability Performance and Time) or Real-time profile is more fundamental. UML 2 has already incorporated modeling approaches for Real-time in the form of composite structure diagrams. Various variants of composite structure techniques appeared during the nineties fairly independently. Some of these include: ROOM from Northern Telecom in Canada, Rhapsody from Ilogix (as the OO variant of Statemate), and closer to home POOSL (Parallel Object-Oriented Simulation Language) from the Electrical Engineering department of the TU/e and Koala from Philips Research. The importance of composite structures for Real-time lies in the fact...

Quality, does the business really care?

Business unit managers however just want solutions that work. How these working solutions are accomplished they don't really care. They want it good, cheap and they want it now. They want a product, which will help them reach their...

Comments and observations on CMMi

Generalizing broadly, whilst the 1970’s saw the attention of most published methods turned towards programming, the 1980’s are considered the golden age of system analysis and design methods. Only in the 1990’s has attention turned towards the organizational context of IT efforts. One notable result of this shift was the Capability Maturity Model Integration or CMMi, developed mostly at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the USA.

The current version is 1.2 released in 2006. CMMi is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve...