It ain’t over till it’s over. — Yogi Berra A project manager reports that her project is “48 percent complete.” In terms of what, I wonder? Calendar time? Cost? Effort? I know it’s not 48 percent complete in terms of functionality because there hasn’t been any working code delivered, just a bunch of documents. One approach that makes sense to me is to express completion percentages in terms of implemented requirements. For example, if you have 100 functional requirements, and 48 of them have been successfully implemented, then you’re 48 percent complete! Actually, I oversimplified that a little . . . All requirements are not created equal: Because some requirements cost more to implement than others, and some requirements have a greater business value than others, you could assign relative cost and relative value numbers to each requirement, and calculate completion percentages accordingly. This is good both for measuring the… Read more →
February 2005
Notes from the Asylum
Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest. — Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 95 Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy. — Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, chap. v. 2 My wife is schizophrenic. She’s mostly functional, but she’s crazy. I always feel like someday things are going to get better, even though they never do. Does that make me an optimist? Read more →
Patrick Henry’s Crazy Wife in the Basement
My boy is doing a school report on Patrick Henry. Something I didn’t know about Patrick Henry is that his wife went insane in 1771 and was subsequently kept in a straitjacket in the basement of the family home. Read more →
Another Cultural Phenomenon That Gives Me an Assache
Children at Play signs My neighbors just put one of those Children at Play signs in the street in front of their house. These are for parents who don’t want to be bothered with actually watching their kids to make sure that they’re not playing in the roadway. I’d like to take the damn sign and beat them over the head with it . . . Read more →
Negative Milestones
I buy my first pair of reading glasses. My wife almost weeps when she sees them. “You’re getting old,” she says. Read more →
Ontological Tangents
I can’t figure out why it’s so hard to get my kid to take a shower every night. We ask him to take a shower, he leaves the room like he’s going to do it, but he doesn’t do it. Read more →