Re: Ariane 5 failure

[WhiteR@CRPL.Cedar-Rapids.lib.IA.US (Robert S. White)]

In article <3256ED61.7952@dynamite.com.au>, aebrain@dynamite.com.au says...
>
>12 Staff-months. Now if your staff is 1, then that's maybe $200,000 for
>a single top-notch profi. If your staff is 200, each at 100,000 cost (ie
>average wage is about 50K/year), then that's 20 million. 

   Number of staff * amount of time = staff months 
         (with a dash of reality for reasonable parallel tasks)

   The type of strawman that I had in mind could be 1 person for a year, two 
persons for six months, to a limit of 4 persons for 3 months.  And watch out 
for the mythical man-machine month!

> But say you
>only have the one guy. And say it adds 50% to the risk of failure. With
>consequent and liquidated damages of 100 Million. Then that's 50
>million, 200 thousand it's really costing.

  Projects these days also have a "Risk Management Plan"  per SEI CMM 
recomendations.  That 50% to the risk of failure has to be assigned a estimated 
cost and factored in the decision.


>Feel free to make whatever strawman case you want. The above figures are
>based on 2 different projects (actually the liquidated damages one
>involved 6 people, rather than 1, and an estimated 70% increased chance
>of failure, but I digress).

  I've seen a lot of successes.  Failures most often can be attributed to poor 
judgement by incompetent personnel.  That can be tough to manage when the 
managers don't want to hear bad news or risk projections.  Especially when they 
set up a project and move on before it is done. 
>
>Summary: In the real world, and with the current state-of-the-art, I
>agree with the original statement as an excellent general rule.

  I beg to disagree in the case of higher volume markets.  I do agree very much 
for lower volumes or when the type of development task is new to the engineers 
and managers.  You must have a good understanding of the problem and the 
solution domain to do proper cost tradeoffs that involve significant risk.

___________________________________________________________________________
Robert S. White                    -- an embedded systems software engineer
WhiteR@CRPL.Cedar-Rapids.lib.IA.US -- It's long, but I pay for it!