www.btinternet.com/~adrian.larner/review/norris
The Healthy Software Project
Mark Norris, Peter Rigby, and Malcolm Payne
John Wiley & Sons, 1993
A Review by Adrian Larner for the Computer Journal
The authors of The Healthy Software Project are employees of British Telecom, and have extensive experience of project management using process quality standards, principally ISO9001. They present some valuable learning points, gleaned from their experience and scholarship. Readers that have worked in software development may suffer, as your reviewer did, the aching of old scars.
The book, as its title indicates, is structured around a medical analogy: the authors have, mercifully, resisted the temptation to call it a “paradigm”. Its eight chapters introduce projects and the analogy; discuss the special characteristics of software projects; describe some projects (good, bad, and average); and cover symptoms of project “disease”, therapy (including euthanasia), recovery, and health maintenance. Three appendices treat of quality management systems, product metrics, and a process applicable to project recovery. The analogy is strained at times, even to the inadvertent black humour of: As with people, it is the quality of life ... that is important not mere survival. An invalid software project can cost a fortune to keep.
However, the most important message of the book – often ignored in both theory and practice – is that projects can be, and sometimes should be, recovered. Project management is not merely about adequate planning and monitoring; it must also encompass recognition of when things go wrong (they usually do), and what to do to put them right. Starting with a clean sheet is as rare a privilege for a project manager as it is for a software designer.
The authors’ attempt to present their learning points as an ordered collection is not entirely successful. We find a number of radical remarks that are made once and then ignored: A QMS ... provides a basic level of project control, but no more. Yet the “therapies” proposed all seem to be process (“management”) therapies: for “sick” projects, we need the necessary control mechanisms to recover them. Most radical (and very true): the production of software is a creative process and is usually done on the roll (i.e. in a sustained, enthusiastic burst by skilled and committed software writers). Quite: the authors give lip service to “people” (along with process and product); but in none of their case histories do they mention any of those extraordinary, talented, and often wild people that write the best software, and recover failing projects, technically. This is unquestionably a book by and for project managers: it won’t fool your techies any more than you do.
On metrics, the authors quote Professor Dijkstra (“Metrics is crap.”) but decline to engage with his arguments. However, they remark that many product measures ... are currently offered by the Snake Oil Salesmen ..., the consultants and the tool vendors, with very little evidence that what can be measured is ... useful to measure. Would that we could make the right judgement about metrics merely on the basis of who promotes them: depend on those recommended by employees of large corporations who get no commission on sales?
Finally, a plea to the publisher: proof reading is as important in your trade as testing is in ours. The reader should be spared, at least, poor spelling (euthenasia, committment) and punctuation (the customers aspirations); although the correct placement of “only” is nowadays perhaps more than we could hope (that will only be achieved through projects ...) Even more constructive editing might have clarified, for instance, the ambiguous key drivers: does key mean “major”, “important”, or “essential”? does drivers mean “resources”, “characteristics”, or merely “factors”? Perhaps the authors could advise on TQM (Total Quality Management – neither in the glossary; indeed – and for shame – there are no acronyms in the glossary, and not all are in the index).
Copyright © 1994, 2001 Adrian Larner. The author asserts all moral rights.
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