08-Nov-2005

Process and Quality models: don't treat yourself

Juan Palacio in Navegapolis warns against self-medication in the matter of picking and applying process models and quality models into a business. There are some parts of the world (e.g. South America) that have taken up the fashion of trying to apply CMMI to start-ups of less than 10 people. Others engage in 'wars' over whether to use CMMI or ISO9000. If something 'hurts' in your company, don't automatically self-medicate with what your neighbours are taking, or what you see advertised in management magazines or what the 'big boys' are taking. Avoid consultants that appear to be selling 'hair restoring creams'. Recruit the best software engineers that you can. However, suitable people are always hard to find. One of the laws formulated by Laurence J. Peter may be something like: “If the director of a company needs the help of an expert, he should evaluate the qualifications and experience of potential candidates before contracting anyone. However, a director who has problems in a particular sphere is probably the least able to judge the qualifications and experience of anyone in that particular sphere.

WEB 2.0: Build Failed TrendyException

Ibon Urrutia in Linking Paths is at the IX Jornadas Sidar and has just been listening to the Web2.0 presentations. His worry is that the explosion in people publishing things on web is going to swamp the web with rubbish: the wonderful new tools that will open up the web to everyone have no concept of the 'quality of information'. This is not a call to stop people from publishing what they want. However, some method of human evaluation must be developed so that material of good quality can be separated from the bad.