Effort Metrics Sophisma - Part IV

This a summarization and translation to English of a presentation prepared by me and an associated researcher in 2008. It was used to support our arguments against detailed one-year plans, a demand from the management of a big and interesting project we've been taking part since 2006.


So, what's the point?
The point is that the starting point is wrong! When people from the software development area sought for references in planning in the industry they thought it was obvious to check the techniques used by the custom production industry - where each product represents a different production project, and therefore, design is done product by product - not from the repetitive production industry, after all, software development is custom production, instead of reproduction of the same design in large quantities.

However, the reality is not that simple. While custom production runs under a low uncertainty environment (given that the product design was done beforehand), repetitive production usually runs under uncertainty - demand uncertainty.

Demand uncertainty is what happens to software. I not saying uncertainty in quantity, but uncertainty in building effort. Therefore, although we are talking here about a custom product, the techniques that apply to its production planning activities are the ones related to repetitive production.

In my opinion, those related to Lean Thinking... I am going to talk about this in future posts, now let's go to our third and last logical chaining.

Third Logical Chaining
From the second chaining:
Knowledge based production AND intangible good → there is no physical metrics
Non physical metrics → inaccurate estimates
We have:
Inaccurate estimates  → high uncertainty in the production process
AND
Custom Production → low uncertainty in the production process is expected
Then:
Although software development is custom production, it is not reasonable to use industry's custom production planning methods because they expect low uncertainty in the production process, but what we have is high uncertainty !!!


Now that I have shown, with some formality, that the current effort metrics don't work for software, I feel more comfortable to go forward and explain how to use Agile and Lean Thinking methods for software development planning.