Re: Who dreams up these things?

[David Farbey <David -dot- Farbey -at- lazysoft -dot- com>]

Andrew Plato asked "who dreams up these things" and wrote:

>Why do you need a process to work?  Can't you just do the job and go home?
I
>mean the universe seemed to function pretty well for 29.5 billion years
without
>CMM, RUP, GUP, DIP or any other acronyms. 

Process models can help organise activities, and can help outsiders evaluate
performance. For example when governments start spending taxpayers money on
software systems there should be some objective criteria on which to base a
quality comparison between vendors. This I believe was the point behind
developing the CMM in the first place.

But process models on their own cannot replace content. I once worked on a
project where the project manager had read a book on software development,
and set up his team and his timetable according to the book, which included
badgering me to produce content templates for a range of document types.
Suddenly we realised that he had no ideas about what he actually wanted to
produce. There were in fact no requirements, real or presumed, on which to
base any actual work. The project collapsed, despite its darn good
processes.

If this is what Andrew is complaining about (difficult to know, sometimes,
:-) )then I agree that processes on their own may well be over-rated.

David Farbey
Technical Writer
Lazy Software Ltd
david -dot- farbey -at- lazysoft -dot- com
"If a man speaks in a forest and his wife's not there, is he still wrong?"