hbowie's Quotations

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving….

…the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things, that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.

“First, he writes down the question on a blackboard or a yellow pad of paper.

“Next, he thinks real hard….

“Then, he writes down the answer.”

One Nobel Prize winner describing the process another, Richard Feynman, used to solve the most difficult scientific problems

When you find a project team that is focused on producing a standard document rather than on considering the content of that document, then you are in the land of the template zombies….

In the land of the template zombies, form takes precedence. It is not necessary to think about the content of the document. It is not really necessary to think at all. The important thing is to have something—anything—under each of the prescribed headings. Not surprisingly, template zombies are adept in the art of cutting and pasting and ignoring anything that does not fit the dictates of the template.

If you keep probing, and ask “Precisely what is in the document? What is it for? Who uses it to make which decisions?” then you discover that people do not know why. They are producing the document because it is the next thing to do.

If you recognize this behavior on your project, you may be working in a paper mill.

In a paper mill, every activity is marked by the production of a document, and progress is measured by how many of the documents have been produced—not by what the documents contain. The paper mill principle says: Just in case anyone needs anything, let’s give everbody everything.

There is probably no job on earth for which an ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast is more of a requirement than software project management. We are routinely expected to work ourselves into a state of believing in a deadline, a budget, or a performance factor that time subsequently may prove to be impossible.

Perhaps the greatest cognitive barrier we face in making sense of the world is that we have come to view certain realities as part of a “natural order” that will remain unchallenged. In fact, many “fundamental truths” that we take for granted are simply the fragile constructs of history and could shift radically in the decade ahead.

The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for increased complexity, and not from biased mutation. It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.

The primary components of requirements management are requirements elicitation, requirements triage and requirements specification.