Project Oriel

On DMAIC’s failings when applied to software development:

“the fundamental goal of DMAIC is to standardize the output of a process, to reduce variation and make the final result as consistent and as repeatable as possible.  However, software development is not a repeatable process and can never have the same output.  Software development creates a unique product (the output) every single time.  As an analogy, DMAIC aims to create perfectly consistent cakes, but software development aims to create a new recipe each time.”

DMAIC is part of Six Signma, and is a method with the following 5 steps: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.

Some great survey results about Agile:

78% of business stakeholders are more satisfied with Agile projects than Traditional projects.

[via Agile Modeling, Scott W. Ambler]

Everything a company does, can not be directly coorelated to benefiting the customer. Ester Derby says it best in Non-valued added, but necessary:

“tasks that don’t directly add value to the customer, but enable delivering value to the customer. Sometimes these are the tasks and functions that enable the business to stay in business–like accounting, or payroll, or management.”

On why software development is more agile than PMBOK expects:

“Software exhibits a characteristic known as “Extreme Modifiability” meaning we can make many changes, even late in the lifecycle and still be successful. While it would be difficult to move a bridge 3 miles upstream when it was 75% complete; we could choose to move validation logic from the presentation layer, to a middle tier, or a database trigger late into a project.”

Great visuals in the article too. [via Leading Answers]

Two people on a phone call can speak in different languages but will hear their native language. This is what Kurzweil predicted would be a reality in 2009 or 2010.

I have not yet heard of the phone version yet, but this is now a reality when you use email thanks to Google’s Automatic message translation:

“you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. It’s not quite the universal translators we’re so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it’s an exciting step in the right direction.”