Waltzing With Bears
Managing Risk on Software Projects
by Tom DeMarco · first published 2003
82% recommend18% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Covers risk management for software projects, with practical methods for identifying risks and estimating their probabilities. The book is short, funny and insightful, and useful for managers and project leads.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Might I suggest "Waltzing with bears" by Tom DeMarco. It's about, as he quotes, "Risk Management, or Project Management for Grown-ups". Overly Bureaucratic cultures got that way for a reason, and it is rarely worth your time trying to…
on “Ask HN: Best project management tool?” ↗May I suggest the book "Waltzing with Bears" by Tom DeMarco and Lister. It's simple tag line is "risk management is project management for grown ups" As CEO your job (IMHO!) is not to "manage" the tasks so the project hits it's deadlines. It's…
on “Saving a Project and a Company” ↗After reading Waltzing with Bears I really think that any discussion of Project Management that doesn't focus on risk management at all is incomplete. It's important to make an honest list of all the risks to your projects and the estimated…
on “The Good Project Manager” ↗…is lacking in the places where it would make a difference -- issue trackers, for example. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Information-Risk-A... edit -- Another good book in this area is Waltzing with Bears by DeMarco & Lister. A short, funny, insightful read, as you'd expect from the authors of PeopleWare: https://www.amazon.com/Waltzing-Bears-Managing-Software-Proj...
on “Open-sourcing Riskquant, a library for quantifying risk” ↗DeMarco & Lister (yes, the Peopleware guys) - Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects
on “Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?” ↗Some other books I can recommend to read alongside McConnell's are Waltzing With Bears by DeMarco and Lister (of Peopleware fame) and How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard.
on “How to replace estimations and guesses with a Monte Carlo simulation” ↗Tom DeMarco describes a method in Waltzing With Bears that's quite interesting: use a triangle defined by the three points as a rough approximation for the probability distribution, and then cumulative distribution function calculations are just juggling…
on “Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)” ↗…can start out with clear and non-contradictory requirements, probably anything you do is going to succeed better than when you don't. There's a good book on risk management that goes into this more, Waltzing With Bears, by Demarco and Lister
on “Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” ↗…self promotion, I've also written a tiny blog post relating Slack and the need for upkeep (software operations and maintenance)[7]. Next, fully in engineering/project management, I have to recommend "Waltzing with Bears" by Tom DeMarco and Anthony Lister[8], which is specifically about managing risk on software projects. The authors highlight the common practice of project/engineering managers communicating their "nano…
on “Ask HN: Reading for first time managers” ↗I love Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects. But it's 20 years old now. Is there a more modern book that helps to explain to software teams all the risks inherent in software projects and gives advice on how…
on “Ask HN: Modern equivalent to Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software” ↗Waltzing With Bears. Oh my god how I wish I had read that one book.
on “Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?” ↗Tom DeMarco talks about modelling-based estimates in Waltzing With Bears, mainly to break people out of the error they fall into of treating the soonest possible time something could be done as a realistic estimate of when something will actually be finished. There are also…
on “Always Multiply Your Estimates by π (2013)” ↗There's a lot of truth in this article, and it reminds me on what Tom DeMarco writes in this book "Waltzing With Bears" (ISBN 9780932633606): DeMarco argues that having detailed, quantified information about your risks enables you to make more courageous decisions. But in order to be able to quantify your risks, your…
on “The Power of Negative Thinking” ↗…essay. I wrote a 3000-word review of one book[1] that diverged into fuzzy logic, theories of jurisprudence and a few other areas in order to properly explain my reaction. Right now I'm writing a review of Waltzing with Bears that will diverge into financial accounting and a pet theory of mine about how tools create paradigms that shape entire bodies of knowledge. Third, books can often be connected to one another. I find…
on “Bill Gates: Books I Read this Summer” ↗DeMarco and Lister of Peopleware fame wrote a book, Waltzing with Bears, which models risk and value as curves. You look for the overlap in the risk/value curves to help you decide whether, on balance, you're on a good thing.
on “Software estimation considered harmful? (2011)” ↗