Æliens

Critical Success Factors

• use incremental scheduling and staging
• find and fix failing ideas
• develop a habit of delivering
• Get: sponsor, project manager, technical leader

Key Failure Indicators

• absence of incremental development
• use of C++ in commercial IS

see Surviving Object-Oriented Projects: A managers Guide

OO - Success and Failure

• OO = technology + mind-set
• it might be new technology to your organisation
• developers love it!
• requires and enables communication between groups
• adopting OO may succeed or fail!

Possible benefits - responsiveness

• responsiveness - variations on a theme
• responsiveness to change!
• time-to-market
• communication - developers, users, executives
• maintenance, reuse, productivity
• GUI development
• morale -- cutting-edge technology

Drawbacks

• Are YOU underestimating?
• productivity takes time
• hazards of C++ (and Java, ...)
• reuse is difficult
• establishing a software process
• business-modeling or software design?
• CASE helps?
• You will pay for: training, experience, tools, consultants, ...

The hazards of C++?

• C++ won the language war over Eiffel, Objective-C, SOM, C@+, and Java?
• Java -- relative simplicity and portability

Managing (the complexity of) C++

• misconception: C++ is like C
• consider using another language
• Why does C++ exist? - engineering and systems programming
• create a subset of the language
• design and coding standards
• use people with knowledge!

Risk-reduction Strategies

• look carefully all around the project
• detect the risks!
• list the risks in order
• work on the risks in order of danger

see Risk Avoidance Patterns