Because you are enamoured of process (obviously or these guys wouldn't be employed) and have picked expensive tools, you get down on the method as if it is responsible for those choices....

We used Rally (Rallye?) and it worked very well for us and I don't think it was extortionate in costs.

I've seen a lot of waterfall projects die under the weight of tools and management ideas (too terrible to be methodologies). Same with other ideas like XP Programming (always doing pair work is insane for experienced teams but having that as an option is not).

You can always mis-apply a technology or conceptual approach poorly enough to kill a project.

The way you are pursuing Agile may be suicidal, but that is not necessarily Agile's fault.

If you don't understand the requirements well enough to create broad users stories for features (to be refined and broken down further into smaller subordinate user stories in the iterations where those featurs are worked on), you certainly don't know enough to estimate them and you'll never be able to tell a client or funding source how much the work is going to cost (even broadly).

User stories can be as big a mire as you choose. When we used Agile on a $1M+ contract, we delivered in something like 18 sprints (the last ones were bug killing sprints) and the major items sought were delivered. Lots of 'nice to do' were too, but not all. We only ever spent about one afternoon doing sprint planning (for a team of about 6 at our end and another few overseas) for any sprint (there was preplanning for major features by sprint but we'd have to develop the subordinate user stories at the start of each sprint and put our estimates in).

The project was very successful.

The way a manager of mine once put it: You need process, but just enough. Too much and you die under the weight of it, too little and you get lost in the bushes with no idea when you'll finish or if you'll finish. That applies to any methodology: Waterfall, Objectory, Rational, Agile, etc.

You don't watch many of the shows where people go into screwed up housing and repair things often done by professional contractors (a lot done by non-pros too, but that's an aside here). Even professionals get in over their head.

Mostly not.

For instance, Ottawa was having a train tunnel put through downtown with a limestone geology. The company did test drills all along. Then they agreed to a fixed top end cost (the City forced that as they knew this could go badly). Along the way, sinkholes, collapses, and the predictably bad geology making things tough on the contractor.

Most of these big projects either are so overpriced to begin with to cope with the massive uncertainties or they end up being so late and overbudget it isn't funny.

The thing about the software world is in many cases, if you told the customer actually how much the thing the customer wants done and done right would cost, they'd give up at the start.

Once they are $600K into a project, another $50K here or there (adding up possibly to another $200 or more) is absorbed with ill grace but follows the doctrine of sunk costs and not wanting to lose that investment so sending more money down the hole....

This is a great way to do things. It's just hard to get some clients to understand that.

One of the reasons clients come to software companies is because they DO NOT understand software. Thus, they want things that they would ask for in other business areas or engineering areas where concrete schedules and tasks (such as building buildings) are not particularly new.

Educating your customer is difficult but having done so, you reap some significant rewards. Also having an uneducated customer can sometimes be worse for your team than no customer at all (I've been on the sorts of projects that broke project teams and lead to significant talent outflow).

Accountability can kind of be built into Agile development by the way in which features for sprints are assigned and then results and velocity are tracked at the granular level. Of course, this depends on the how the Agile is attempted. I've seen it done in ways that didn't couple the product closely to the business requirements leading to wasted effort and inefficiency too.

Well, I agree with days, and maybe weeks, but likely never months. Generally in my experience, if you can't estimate a thing in days or a few weeks, you haven't broken it down enough and don't understand it well enough. Plus shaving time to make tight bids or to satisfy management is a lot harder when you are working in terms of weeks because a week can be a lot to lose.

The problem most times with estimates for truly new types of work (like some I was involved in during the mid nineties on mobile computing for our federal police) was that there are a lot of technical unknowns and some may actually be insoluble or very lengthy to address. That can blow those very low granularity estimates all to heck. I think that project was months late and finished $200K or more over budget on an $800K or $1.2M project (I forget now exactly).

On the other hand, I've been on projects where we did a $46K technical investigation/requirements development assistance first on a $250K project after and totally de-risked the thing from a technical perspective as well as being sure we knew what features we wanted and what tech was best. So we built the $250K project on-budget and within about 1 week of the planned schedule (just to take out some final glitches).

I've also worked on Agile projects where they estimated by sprint and the only larger scale planning was feature planning per sprint. Of course, that was for a product company, not a contracting company - they have very different project planning requirements in my experience due to how they get their funding (customers won by bid versus from corporate leadership investing in a new product).

The problem with Agile and the world of big companies is that most accounting departments and management techniques and de-risking analysis wants definitive progress indicators and deadlines for market and costs for funds allocation in accounting ahead of when Agile can provide these things. Many managers and accountants still love the fiction inherent in waterfall project planning. Our Agile work did deliver excellent product in what I think of as minimum time (my opinion) but it gave many of the waterfall lovers apoplexy and dealing with higher level management and accounting apoplexy isn't always a simple thing for project technical managers/leaders.

Sales people and execs agree, software developers simply try to invent tomorrow's answer today for a deadline yesterday. Often they end up inventing a duck billed platypus with the intention that it function in the vacuum of space (to wit, not a very successful design or outcome).

I should know. I've built that damn platypus against good sense but under orders.

I know a guy who owns an armoured car. it is unarmed, but he takes it out at times and drives around.

So you can own an armoured vehicle.

One of the issues of tanks and other modern armoured vehicles is that they are *integrated systems* and the manufacturer may be able to sell you a tank, but not if it contains defense department secret technologies like range finders, sighting systems, computer driven stabilization systems, EW and comms gear, etc.

So, although perhaps you could buy such a vehicle as a raw vehicle, you couldn't buy the entire integrated array of technologies.

I think to satisfy realistic control of those technologies, you should pay (as a consumer wanting to buy one) the cost of the vehicle and the cost of extraction of those technologies from the integrated system (if even possible).

So then you could still buy an M1, but it might cost you 1.3 or 1.5x the cost of a fully-integrated standard M1.

The issue with the police being outgunned isn't on the overall scale (eventually enough ERT members will show up). It's a short (and lethal) time where patrol officers with pistols, limited armour, and unarmoured patrol cars are engaged by high velocity portable weapons systems. That's when they are outgunned and the LA bank situation was an example of that that had nothing to do with a Cartel. So would be some active shooter/terrorism examples and police are expected to be first responders here too.

There are permissions viewers, but you may also find permission managers. I have one installed but my phone is charging.

Not sure if the app has been borked by updates since the last time I went and used it to revoke some permissions after installation. It may have been. Google has tampered a bunch with security settings.

I usually go adjust the permissions after installation but before first execution.

Ultimately, people should light a fire under Google to force app publishers to only request perms they really need and to allow users to disable any perms they don't like (and encourage app devs to not make that break their app - modular enable-able/disable-able app functionality please!). Of course, that may be hard. If they still can't do a f***ing table of contents in Google Docs with page numbers, there isn't much hope they can get this right or will pay attention to massive outcry. In some ways, Google is a metric pantload of nerds doing nerd things and ignoring anyone that might actually use their apps. Microsoft, for all its flaws, was often more customer responsive than Google has been. Just sayin'.

There are tools that will let you edit app permissions after installation to remove some of them. Or at least I have installed and used those in past and hoped they worked. In some cases, apps check at startup and bork themselves like petulant children if they don't get what they want (even if they didn't need it) but others seem to run fine without the extraneous permissions (like ones that would allow linking to social media that I don't use so the function never gets invoked).

Ultimately, I should never have to enable an app feature that I will never use and should never have to grant permissions except as needed for the features I actually use. PC apps got this long ago (for the most part). Mobile apps have taken terrible directions in this respect.

What was the logic of that sale?

Was it simply to raise government revenues by any means they could and someone said 'this vaccine that is unproven and not (at the time in 2010) required or in demand is worth $200K if we sell an exclusive license"? Even that could be defensible as the government has some responsibility to help provide non-taxation revenues where it can.

Or was the notion to make it available for potential production for a modest fee? That may have factored into the thinking. For this point, an exclusive license may have been a poor choice.

Every government I have seen behaves in ways I do not approve of. I refuse to call any of them evil as most politicians are morally flexible - it is part of why they can engage in compromise and diplomacy when they choose. This government is not my favourite, but I simply dislike and disagree with their policies. Those I can take clear issue with without needing to step off into abusive ad hominem territory.

There are many that would blame Mr. Harper's government for heavy snowstorms (global warming), downturns in the global economy (greed and elitism, Bilderbergism, etc), the tensions in Eastern Europe (grandstanding, not cozying up to an ex-Soviet KGB strongman with familiar tendencies, etc), global warming (albeit the majority of that comes to provide energy we all collectively use), and everything else. That is ultimately a bad sort of process because it obscures legitimate critiques of the policies his Government supports and instead focuses on personal attacks.

Mr. Harper appears to be a power-hungry politician who plays hard ball and prefers adversarial relations with the other parties, rather than a more collegial one. That doesn't make him different than many others past and future and is irrelevant (red herring) where it does not directly relate to any particular policy (as policies should stand or fall on their own merits).