James,
Thanks, that's an interesting answer.
Lots of fields other than software struggle with similar issues. For example, I can't remember the last time a major aerospace manufacturer managed to design and build one of their flagship products on schedule, and major public transportation projects in the U.S. seem to fall behind schedule and over budget on a regular basis
If it wouldn't be a distraction from other priorities, I'm wondering if project management could be the subject of a Tech Talk sometime. (Cc'ing Rachel who I believe coordinates Tech Talks.)
Thanks,
Pine
On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 3:16 PM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 27 July 2015 at 14:44, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
James,
Thanks. I have a follow up question regarding project management in
general. When the length of time for development and testing are unbounded
so that product quality is the principal goal, how do you forecast needs for human resources and financial resources?
The trite answer is "guesstimation based on professional experience", but in general the honest answer is that no-one has solved this issue in Computer Science (the snake oil salespeople who claim otherwise would protest).
Instead, the industry focusses on a variety of techniques around concepts like scoping the issue (iterations), treating the symptoms (Waterfall) or recognising failure quickly (agile). It's a fascinating field, and there are many people far more qualified to opine on it than me (I never even did my PhD). My vague gut feeling is that in a century or two the world will have settled down and we'll have solved this problem, but before then we'll have outsourced such work to semi-strong AI and it'll be their issue. :-)
J.
James D. Forrester Lead Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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