Nano-Blog : April 6, 2025

Nano-Blog for the week of April 6, 2025.

§ April 8, 2025

Measuring Progress in Software Projects

There's an apocryphal quote attributed to manufacturing and business genius W. Edwards Deming: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." As the Deming Institute tells us, while it sounds like something Dr. Deming might say, he did not say that. Deming's thoughts are subtler, involving reasoning about what is knowable and unknowable as mentioned in this blog post by John Hunter.

Deming's ideas on how to run a production system, often called "Lean Manufacturing", were translated into the software domain as Lean Software Development. Mary and Tom Poppendieck wrote a very nice book about applying Lean Manufacturing principles to software in 2003: Lean Software Development. It's a relatively short and easy read and well worth the time. One of the nice features of Lean Software Development is, like eXtreme Programming, it's practices can be adopted one-at-a-time by individual teams, depending on their need.

On the other end of the organizational scale is Robert Grady and Deborah Caswell's Software Metrics: Establishing a Company-Wide Program. This text is from the 1980s and describes how the authors convinced Hewlett-Packard to start measuring the results of the software development process. It is unlikely modern readers will encounter exactly the same type of issues as described in this book, but I loved the description of how the metrics were chosen. There's still wisdom in these pages.

#books #software-eng