Last Monday we had the pleasure of inviting Tom Gilb to run an internal engineering management workshop at 9LivesData.
Here are some takeaways from the experience:
- The key to being competitives is not in what the system does (functionality) but rather in how well it does it (quality).
- All our engineering communication should be viewed in the light of quantified qualities desired by actual stakeholders. Otherwise we greatly increase the risk of miscommunication that may result in costly rework or outright failure.
- It is economically unrealistic to remove all the defects in a system. However it is easily possible to greatly reduce the number of defects injected into the system by being disciplined about quality at each stage: starting with clear and unambiguous statement of the goal (see Chapter 8 in Tom Gilbs “Competitive Engineering” book).
- Rules for requirements (if those basic rules are not met everything else is built on a shaky foundation):
- unambiguous to intended readership,
- clear enough to test,
- no unintentional design.
- “Experts know the state of the art in their area.“
If you want to learn more about Tom Gilb and his teachings join us, watch his TEDx talk or visit his website.
If you want us to help you deliver well defined impacts instead of just working software, let’s do a project together!