I'd rather play golf

A paper [1] in this month’s edition of Communcations of the ACM caught my attention this week. As a manager of a research and development team, I’m always on the lookout for research pertaining to software development practices and software quality. The paper, entitled Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of [...]

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Last September I penned some thoughts on documenting project failure and its importance in the product development process, prompted by reading similar views held by Don Reinertsen in his book Managing the Design Factory [1]. Recently I came across a paper [2] by Terry Williams, Director of the School of Management at the University of [...]

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A significant difference between Computer Science and Engineering curricula is that management of the Engineering process is a formal discipline within Engineering, whereas, in my experience at least, management is given very little emphasis in Computer Science programs. Hence it is useful for engineering and product managers to pay attention to the IEEE’s Technology Management [...]

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In two previous posts, part un and part deux, I briefly summarized three of the important themes Don Reinertsen describes in The Principles of Product Development Flow [1]: Economics, Queuing, and Variability. In this final part, I’ll briefly summarize two other themes, Batch Size and WIP constraints, and present some closing remarks. Batch Size Understanding [...]

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In my previous post I began this book review by concentrating on the first two important themes Don Reinertsen describes in The Principles of Product Development Flow [1]: Economics and Queuing. In this part deux, we briefly summarize another important theme: Variability. Variability Completely eliminating variability in the product development process is often seen as [...]

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In his latest book, The Principles of Product Development Flow [1] to be released next month, Don Reinertsen challenges what he calls the “current orthodoxy” of product development, which in his view suffers from its failure to recognize, and correctly quantify, economic factors and their essential role in management decision making. Tightly coupled to this [...]

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The value of Don Reinertsen‘s latest book, The Principles of Product Development Flow [1], is that his insights, embodied in the theory and principles within the book, can be applied to a wide variety of situations in product development. Testing is no exception: Reinertsen discusses the benefits of queue size reduction with respect to software [...]

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I have written previously about the advantages of collocated software development teams from the perspective of reducing latency in the interactions amongst team members. In Don Reinertsen‘s new book, The Principles of Product Development Flow [1], Mr. Reinertsen also addresses the disadvantages of disperse product development teams. However, rather than (simply) focus on latency, Mr. [...]

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Don Reinertsen’s The Principles of Product Development Flow [1] is a book about improving the product development process (ie its management). In several ways it is a follow-on to Reinertsen’s Managing the Design Factory [2] that I’ve previously commented on in this blog. It does, however, have a very different style and a different emphasis. [...]

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Last week I was startled to receive an email from Don Reinertsen, author of the product development books Managing the Design Factory and Developing Products in Half the Time. Mr. Reinertsen has written a new book [1] about the product development process, due to be released in May 2009, and it’s entitled The Principles of [...]

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