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Military-industrial complex

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 16 March 2023

The phrase “military-industrial complex” was coined by President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation in 19611. In this address, Eisenhower spoke of the deterrence value of military strength:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Simultaneously, he warned of the potential danger in the growing relationship between the military establishment and the defense industry:

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Agile SE Part Five: Agility on Large, Complex Programs

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 4 March 2023

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Putting it all together

In this series we’ve introduced agile concepts, requirements, contracting, and digital engineering (DE) for physical systems. These things are all enablers to agility, they don’t make a program agile per se. The key for agility is how the program is planned and functions prioritized.

Agile program planning

A traditional waterfall program is planned using the Statement of Work (SOW), Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), and Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). This basically requires scheduling all of the work before the project starts, considering dependencies, key milestones, etc. Teams know what to work on because the schedule tells them what they’ll be working on when. At least in theory.

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College interviewing tips

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 29 October 2022

For several years I’ve been volunteering as an alumni interviewer for my alma mater. It’s enjoyable to spend a bit of time interacting with a younger generation and exploring their interests; my optimism is buoyed by their potential.

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Minimum Viable Product (MVP): You’re doing it wrong

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 16 July 2022

Quibi was a short-lived short-form video app. It was founded in August 2018, launched in April 2020, and folded in December 2020, wiping out $1.75 billion of investor’s money. That’s twenty months from founding to launch and just six months to fail. Ouch.

Forbes chalked this up to “a misread of consumer interests”; though the content was pretty good, Quibi only worked as a phone app while customers wanted TV streaming, and it lacked social sharing features that may have drawn in new viewers. It was also a paid service competing with free options like YouTube and TikTok. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company’s attempts to address the issues were too late: “spending on advertising left little financial wiggle room when the company was struggling”.

If only there was some way Quibi could have validated its concept prior to wasting nearly two billion dollars2.

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Agile isn’t faster

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 15 May 2022

A common misconception is that Agile development processes are faster. I’ve heard this from leaders as a justification for adopting Agile processes and read it in proposals as a supposed differentiator. It’s not true. Nothing about Agile magically enable teams to architect, engineer, design, test, or validate any faster.

In fact, many parts of Agile are actually slower. Time spent on PI planning, backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily stand-ups3, and retrospectives is time the team isn’t developing. Much of that overhead is avoided in a Waterfall style where the development follows a set plan.

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You Don’t Understand Murphy’s Law: The Importance of Defensive Design

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 21 February 2022

CALLBACK is the monthly newsletter of NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS)4. Each edition features excerpts from real, first-person safety reports submitted to the system. Most of the reports come from pilots, many by air traffic controllers, and also the occasional maintainer, ground crew, or flight attendant. Human factors concerns feature heavily and the newsletters provide insight into current safety concerns5. ASRS gets five to nine thousand reports each month, so there’s plenty of content for the CALLBACK team to mine.

The February 2022 issue contained this report about swapped buttons:

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Agile SE Part Four: Digital Transformation

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 3 January 2022

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A quick detour

This article is a quick detour on an important enabler for agile systems engineering. “Digital transformation” means re-imagining the way businesses operate in the digital age, including how we engineer systems. As future articles discuss scaling agile practices to larger and more complex systems, it will be very helpful to understand the possibilities that digital engineering unlocks.

Digital engineering enables the agile revolution

The knee-jerk reaction to agile systems engineering is this: “sure, agile is great for the speed and flexibility of software development, but there’s just no way to apply it to hardware systems”. Objections range from development times to lead times to the cost of producing physical prototypes.

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Agile SE Part Three: Agile Contracts and the Downfall of Requirements

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 22 September 2021

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The antithesis of agile

Requirements are a poor way to acquire a system. They’re great in theory, but frequently fail in practice. Writing good requirements is hard, much harder than you’d think if you’ve never had the opportunity. Ivy Hooks gives several examples of good and bad requirements in the paper “Writing Good Requirements“. Poor requirements can unnecessarily constrain the design, be interpreted incorrectly, and pose challenges for verification. Over-specification results in spending on capabilities that aren’t really needed while under-specification can result in a final product that doesn’t provide all of the required functions.

If writing one requirement is hard, try scaling it up to an entire complex system. Requirements-based acquisition rests on the assumption that the specification and statement of work are complete, consistent, and effective. That requires a great deal of up-front work with limited opportunity to correct issues found later. A 2015 GAO report found that “DoD often does not perform sufficient up-front requirements analysis”, leading to “cost, schedule, and performance problems”.

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Agile SE Part Two: What’s Your Problem?

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 25 August 2021

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A faster horse

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Apocryphally attributed to Henry Ford6

When people trot out that quote they’re often trying to make the point that seeking user feedback will only constrain the design because our small-minded <sneer>users</sneer> cannot possibly think outside the box. I disagree with that approach. User feedback is valuable information. It should not constrain the design, but it is essential to be able to understand and empathize with your users. They say “faster horse”? It’s your job to generalize and innovate on that desire to come up with a car. The problem with the “singular visionary” approach is that for every wildly successful visionary there are a dozen more with equally innovative ideas that didn’t find a market.

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Agile SE Part One: What is Agile, Anyway?

Posted by Benjamin Schwartz on 15 August 2021

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What is “Agile”?

Agile is a relatively new approach to software development based on the Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles. These documents are an easy read and you should absolutely check them out. I will sum them up as stating that development should be driven by what is most valuable to the customer and that our projects should align around delivering value.

Yes, I’ve obnoxiously italicized the word value as if it were in the glossary of a middle school textbook. That’s because value is the essence of this entire discussion.

Little-a Agile

With a little-a, “agile” is the ability to adapt to a changing situation. This means collaboration to understand the stakeholder needs and the best way to satisfy those needs. It means changing the plan when the situation (or your understanding of the situation) changes. It means understanding what is valuable to the customer, focusing on delivering that value, and minimizing non-value added effort.

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