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I’ve been working on an interesting project at work. It isn’t the normal kind of understand this process help us improve it work, however. I might call it “using statistics for evil” except that the intent isn’t really evil. It’s just that people don’t like what the data is telling them. The back story is […]
February 19, 2009
So I’ve been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently. It’s a decent book, though not significantly different from his other work Fooled by Randomness. Having read the latter I realized he introduced a flaw to his own thinking in the former. In Fooled By Randomness he talks about how people make up […]
February 17, 2009
Cost, quality and speed. They’re the three things that everyone talks about as the main things to measure for an organization. Today someone brought up one that I initially dismissed, but did have some thoughts about – scalability. As processes go, we tend not to worry too much about scale. What does scale mean anyway? […]
February 12, 2009
I don’t care for surveying. There are times when you need to do it, but as I learned early on, surveys are not good ways to get measurable data. Surveys are good ways to get opinions. Around my office, we tend to use surveys to ask a bunch of people questions about measurable things. It […]
February 10, 2009
It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity for a good rant. Today provided it. Not that long ago I wrote about the new measurement system QA was proposing - defects per test case – as a proxy for code quality. Anyway, as part of that effort I had to then go out to […]
February 7, 2009
I’m not much of a reader honestly. I know that seems strange, but I like to take information in small quantities, like articles, short chapters, etc. Works that need me to read from beginning to distant end to get the whole story don’t keep my attention. So it’s a bit odd that I would be […]
February 4, 2009
Have you ever wanted someone to say this about your company “wow, we are really horrible at doing X”? And I don’t mean in a thank-god-they-are-admitting-they-have-issues kind of way, but more in a “I’m really proud we can’t do that well” kind of way. Up until recently, I thought the answer to my question was “are you […]
February 28, 2009
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