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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Adrian Midgley wrote: > > ...... it amounts to a suggestion that the underlying > nature of the universe may be why Open Source development is better than > Prince2. It might just be that Prince 2 sucks ;) I think it could well also be that few people know how to implement it properly, and so it places yet another barrier to getting things done. Almost everyone I know doing big projects this way have train the majority of people in PRINCE 2 first! "Hi skilled software development manager with successful projects behind you, afraid this is a government project so you will throw away what worked on the last N projects and comply with our mandatory scheme because the budget exceeds some magic threshold (which probably hasn't been inflation adjusted for 15 years).". You rarely see any attempt at anything this structured in the private sector, because it isn't competitive, and can lead to death by burocracy if done badly. The most serious software engineering I saw was at Digital's messaging group. They had got to the point of predictable schedules(!), somewhere around level 3, and had reached the conclusion that enhancing the process much further was not cost effective! Indeed the level they got to was only cost effective because some clients were prepared to pay big bucks for predictable schedules..... That isn't to say that you don't need BIG projects, and some parts of the public sector are bigger than most (or all) big companies, but I don't think sudden descent into old fashioned waterfall software development models, and large teams, ever helped. Athough I don't think Prince 2 mandates this either, but it happens. Building big, and complex software requires infrastructure, experience, and a skilled workforce. Just like building the pyramids. You break it into smaller projects, specialist roles etc. That's how the Met. Office rewrote an entire forecast model and suite in 18 months after telling the Prince 2 people where to put it! Eveyone knew their role, and what was expected of their part of the project, not least because a lot of them had done it before. They were also familiar with many of the tools, although I fear their tool choice was somewhat archaic, that's a hazard of the business, everything moves on so quick. Try going out into the market place and recruiting software testers, with experience of large projects, my guess is you'd be lucky to get ANY. So if you were to deploy a big computer system for say 400,000 users, you'd probably have to develop those skills inhouse, and the effort would be immense. Whilst systems like the Internet are huge they are huge by replicating and repeating the same small things over and over again. Prince 2 doesn't preclude Open Source (or free software), so that part of the comparison is apples and oranges. Simon -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE/mEedGFXfHI9FVgYRAsv8AKCQkZogLQPB16DRXZ1T1wrEwXAPrgCeOJ0L AVyLIjaYEYtKpp76eUiIt2I= =1Dzi -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.