Also see "On Risk and Estimating and Agile Methods". This post is yet another angle on a common theme.

See The Question of Risk.

Also, see Lean Projects -- Not Deficient Projects.

And Keeping the Customer Satisfied.

These are notes for a long, detailed rant on the value of Agile methods.

One specious argument against an Agile approach is the "risk management" question. In this case, however, it becomes a …

Back in the olden days (ca. 1981) Barry Boehm's Software Engineering Economics provided a detailed and definitive guide to estimating. It did one really important thing: it provided a conceptual model of software development that had a (relatively) focused set of degrees of freedom, an input driver and a couple …

Michael Shermer's column, in the July 2007 Scientific American , "The Prospects for Homo economicus ", notes that we all impaired when it comes to making economic decisions.

Also, see Kathleen Melymuka's article in the July 23, 2007 Computerworld , "Boiling the IT Frog ". Harwell Thrasher suggests that simple ROI calculations don't work …

Yes, it's an omission and, yes, it's a mistake. I should have said something along the lines of "risk is an uninteresting complication" or "risk is just a euphemism for bad management."

Why is risk uninteresting?

First, the seeds (Chad Fowler's "The Big Rewrite ", and CodeCraft, "To Rewrite or not …