The Hindu Business Line : Software

THE road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. How bad! But that's a Philip Roth quote that greets you right at the start of Software Project Management, by Bob Hughes and Mike Cotterell. Now into its third edition, the book from Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Co Ltd (www.tatamcgrawhill.com) handles "the more agile approaches to software projects such as Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM) and Extreme Programming (XP)", apart from giving inputs on Project Management Institute of the US and Association of Project Management of the UK.

How are software projects special? The authors speak of four qualities, viz. invisibility, complexity, conformity and flexibility. "With software, progress is not immediately visible"; and "per dollar, pound or euro spent, software products contain more complexity than other engineered artefacts." To add to the woes of software creation, "Organisations, because of lapses in collective memory, in internal communication or in effective decision-making, can exhibit remarkable `organisational stupidity' that developers have to cater for." Software is so easy to change; but flexibility is both a strength and source for trouble because "software will change to accommodate the other components rather than vice versa."

Often projects fail because of faulty estimation of effort required. An over-estimate can cause the project to take longer, because two laws come into play: Parkinson's Law, that work expands to fill the time available, and Brooks' Law, that putting more people on a late job makes it later! What happens if there is an under-estimate? Your staff may respond to deadlines with substandard work, and this is `Weinberg's zeroth law of reliability' in action - "if a system does not have to be reliable, it can meet any other objective."

A parametric model you'd read about in the book is COCOMO - short for COnstructive COst MOdel). The basic equation is effort = c x sizek where effort is measured in pm, or the number of `person-months' consisting of units of 152 working hours, size is measured in kdsi, thousands of delivered source code instructions, and c and k are constants. "Boehm originally used mm (for man-months) when he wrote Software Engineering Economics," states the book, and that's another book you can catch up with. Also, there is now a newer version called COCOMO II, like a movie sequel. For Boehm, the constants depended on the mode of the system, which was organic, embedded or semi-detached.

Take my suggestion: Better be attached to completing the software project because an unfinished one is only a ticket to hell.

Thinking hat for Red Hat

READ, practice and pass the test. Thus screams the cover of RHCE, Exam Study Guide by Michael Jang, published by Dreamtech Press (www.wileydreamtech.com) . The abbreviation stands for Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux. "Major corporations, from Home Depot to Toyota, and governments such as Germany, the Republic of Korea, and Mexico have made the switch to Linux," states the preface. "Major movie studios such as Disney and Dreamworks use Linux to create the latest motion pictures."

About the exam, the author cautions that it is a gruelling five-and-a-hour exercise (twice the length of a world-class marathon). "The most important thing that you can take to the exam is a clear head."

Okay, it's time for some teasers: Which of the following services works to connect Linux to a Microsoft Windows-based network - NFS, SMB, DNS or Windows for Workgroups? Which of the following commands would you use to write an ISO file to a CD - cdburn, cdrecord, isorecord, or xcdrecord?

Some queries are detailed: "You are running an ISP service and provide space for users' Web pages. You want them to use no more than 40MB of space, but you will allow up to 50MB until they can clean up their stuff. How could you use quotas to enforce this policy? a) Enable grace periods; set the hard limit to 40MB and the soft limit to 50MB; b) Enable grace periods; set the hard limit to 40MB and the soft limit to 50MB; c) Enable grace periods; set the soft limit to 40MB and the hard limit to 50MB; or d) None of the above." Are there answers? Yes, in this problem, `c' is the right answer because "this will warn users they are over their limit after the grace period, but will make sure they do not exceed the 50MB true maximum barrier." Option `a' is wrong because "the soft limit must be less than the hard limit," and `b' is same as `a'. Option `d' is incorrect because `c' does the job.

Ready for the double-marathon?

Tailpiece

"I bought a modern dustbin!"

"Oh, the one that makes a gnashing electronic noise when you put garbage into it?"

"No, mine goes about and picks up trash!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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