Get the Business Case Right Every project should have a compelling business need. With appropriate process, design, and implementation, project success is ensured.
There's a rhetorical strategy familiar to anyone who nowadays tunes in to editorial content in the media: A commentator makes a radical assertion that seems plausible on the surface and that seems consistent with a trend. The commentator may not be particularly qualified to make the assertion. (Have you ever asked yourself why we ought to believe those people talking at us on TV news shows? When did we start accepting that someone who has strong opinions is some kind of an expert?) And usually the assertion doesn't bear up well under scrutiny.
Benchmarking Is a Must When the demand from management is “show me the value,” consistent, proven processes are essential. You need benchmarks to analyze and improve your software development practices.
Let me begin this issue of CBR with a statement of full disclosure: I have not often been a fan of modeling-based approaches to software development, at least not in some of their common manifestations. Software modeling is a practice that often, in my opinion, succumbs to a "forest for the trees" problem. Managers confronting business problems are often justified when they ask, amid mind-numbing discussions about abstract diagrams of yet-to-be-built systems, whether modeling efforts truly move them toward real solutions in an efficient manner.
Data mining, the subject of this month's CBR, aims to recover the ability of our information systems to richly inform our corporate decisionmakers. If we can correctly structure data and then interrogate it intelligently, we potentially can deliver on a longtime promise: to provide a better basis for sound business decisions.