No Cure No Pay: How to Contract for Software Services
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This paper specifically addresses the software problem, but the ideas here apply to the wider systems engineering problem to some interesting degree as well.Abstract:
of all software projects are total failures and another 40% are partial failures according to widely quoted surveys in UK, USA and Norway. Large government projects in all 3 countries have been reported with spectacular failure and expense to taxpayers (Royal Academy of Engineering and British Computer Society 2004). What is the problem? Most discussions have centered on improving the software engineering process itself: better estimation, better requirements, better reuse and better testing. No doubt all those can be improved. However, I suggest the motivation to improve them needs to be put in place first. Think about it. Most of these failures have been fully paid for! We not only pay well for failure, but the bigger the failure, the more people get paid! My suggestion is simple. Pay only when defined results are provably delivered. This requires several things: ∞ Contracts that release payment only for meaningful results; ∞ The ability to define those results, particularly qualitative ones, and particularly the organizational ones; ∞ The ability to deliver those results incrementally, thus proving capability at early stages and continuously. Note: This paper specifically addresses the software problem, but I am sure that the ideas here apply to the wider systems engineering problem to some interesting degree as well.read more
Citations
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A Cognitive Model for Meetings in the Software Development Process
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TL;DR: An abstract cognitive model for meetings is proposed, which represents how different types of meetings are affected by cognitive activities at different stages within the SDP, and the removal of such meetings from some of the stages of SDP is proposed by using a cognitive evaluation model.
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A state of the art review on software project performance management
TL;DR: This paper outlines software development failure, then presents two key variables in software project performance management i.e. trust and knowledge sharing.
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A Software Project Management Method Based on Trust and Knowledge Sharing
Rong Fa Tang,Xiao Yu Huang +1 more
TL;DR: The future work could include defining a role and measurement of trust and knowledge sharing in the software project performance.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Integrating Graphical and Natural Language Specifications to Support Analysis and Testing
TL;DR: A model- based approach for improving the quality of comprehensive requirements sets is presented based on a combination of a graphical notation and natural language and can be used to drive model-based testing.
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