[lug] software engineering

[Evelyn Mitchell]

* On 2006-11-13 18:29 Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> Evelyn Mitchell wrote:
> 
> >Has anyone else seen Crew Resource Management in an IT or Systems context?
> 
> Ohhh, now THAT's it... the big spark of an idea I was looking for.
> 
> I'm a pilot and I completely "get" CRM, and know how it really does do a 
> pretty dang good job of keeping a lot of failure-prone people alive 
> every day.

I am not a pilot, though I've taken ground school. The strategies for
learning the best way to do common things so you can cope better with
uncommon things that I learned there have been helpful throughout my tech
career.

> Now I'm going to be stewing over this all night -- how to correctly 
> train and apply CRM techniques in IT.  Hell, thinking about how to sales 
> pitch management on trying to use it... hmmmm...

How about 'if it's good enough for pilots and medical staff'..

As a manager, I think the biggest benefit is the opportunity to settle on a
standard workflow which you can both train on, and improve from. When
everything is ad hoc, you can't improve, you can just cope.

> I can definitely see it working in the Operations side of the house, but 
> lacking a real understanding of the typical software "development 
> process" that happens right at a Software Engineer's desk, I am not sure 
> I'd ever be able to figure out how to teach it to Software Engineers as 
> a methodology.

I don't do enough software development to speak about this, but you may
want to look at the Personal Software Process and the Team Software
Process. 

> Question: Would you consider "pair programming", like what is practiced 
> by the XP methodology folks, similar to CRM techniques in aircraft, 
> minus the refactoring and closed-loop continuous update jive?

I don't know. Pair programming can be quite helpful, but I don't know of
many places that actually do it. Few places track the benefit of higher
quality at a level which would justify doubling their staffing.

> Man that's cool.  CRM in IT.

Thank you for this, you made my day.

-- 
Regards,                    tummy.com, ltd 
Evelyn Mitchell             Linux Consulting since 1995
efm at tummy.com               Senior System and Network Administrators
                            http://www.tummy.com/