Design-risk

Shows how to establish and manage a comprehensive risk management program. The basis of Ms. Hall's approach is called "P2I2", which stands for Process, People, Infrastructure and Implementation. Within these processes are subprocesses and tasks that, as a whole, will result in a risk management posture that is seamlessly integrated into a development project. Although this book is about managing software development project risks, the approach can be applied to any type of project, and can also be tailored to work in an operational or production environment. For example, implementation plans and change control in the operational environment require a risk management strategy, and the methods provided in this book will fill the void with no modification of the basic P2I2 approach.

The process portion of P2I2 consists of 5-steps for managing risks: identify, analyze, plan, track and resolve. For those who manage projects in accordance with the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) processes, the P2I2 on the surface appears different from the 6 steps set forth in the PMBOK. The key difference between the two is the PMBOK's risk management approach groups 5 processes into project planning and 1 into project control, while the P2I2 approach takes a more holistic view and incorporates risk management across the entire project life cycle. If you are striving for or working within the Capability Maturity Model at level 3 or above, then this book is essential and perfectly aligns. The book devotes a chapter to each of the processes, which clearly identifies the what's and how's of each. Note that the book does not cover advanced risk management techniques, such as probability curves - you will need to obtain this information elsewhere. It does give qualitative techniques, and gives quantitative methods to assess ROI for the risk management initiative itself, as well as other metrics to prove its effectiveness or lack thereof.

Implementing the risk management infrastructure is covered in great detail and is a roadmap for making risk management an integral part of your project. It starts with developing a policy, defining standard processes to be employed, training your team and compliance verification and continuous improvement methods. This material spans five chapters, which sets the foundation for the next five chapters that address implementation of the program itself. These chapters cover establishing the initiative, developing the plan, tailoring the process to your environment, and assessing and controlling risks. The last two are excellent primers on their topics.

The remaining five chapters are devoted to the people part of P2I2, and are broken down into stages, each discussed in its own chapter. The stages are: problem, mitigation, prevention, anticipation and opportunity. Each is thoroughly discussed and taken together these last chapters clearly show roles, issues and factors, and how human resources are integrated into a coherent and holistic risk management initiative.

This book is clearly written and well illustrated. The approach is not only practical, it's essential to ensuring the success of any specific project or extended to encompass a development organization. Moreover, it is also essential for any organization that wants to attain CMM level 4 or 5.

An excellent resource. It presents very practical methods for project manager who wants to mange project risk proactively.

This book is impressive and contains a lot of useful detail and original thought. Anyone interested in risk will enjoy and learn from the book as I did. It does tackle "quantified objectives" much better than other texts.

I have used this book and Vol 2 in my graduate and undergraduate courses. Having used a variety of texts for teaching and learning about probability and statistics in an engineering context, I would say the two volumes by Ang and Tang have no rivals. Lots and lots of good engineering type problems.

We used this text as the first half of a graduate course in engineering reliability. It presented the concepts clearly and in terms of engineering problems rather than card picking and coin flipping like many other probability and statistics texts. It also provided a thorough treatment of the mathematical basis of the sciences of probability and statistics.

The second volume is also an excellent text, though I have had trouble locating it recently. It treats the issues of reliability and decision analysis in more detail.

This is the 5th edition of DJ Smith's excellent book on reliability in the real world. Having worked in this field for a number of years, I can honestly say that Mr. Smith has provided a perfect means of understanding the principles behind basic reliability calculations, in a way that is neither condescending nor unneccesarily complex. I recommend this book in the strongest possible terms to readers interested in gaining a greater understanding of the world of reliability engineering without having to trawl through pages of postgraduate mathematics.

This book, despite the editorial description on this page, is entirely about hardware/software integration as it pertains to managing acquisition risk for the buyer and the processes and procedures that need to be employed by the developer.

If you work within the framework of the FDA's General Principles of Software Validation or the FAA's DO-178B for safety-critical avionics the material is consistent with these governing documents, but is too outdated to be useful.

However, if you are working on integrated projects that are unregulated with respect to government controls you may find this book useful. It contains a wealth of useful guidelines for establishing and managing processes to support development of products that are based on embedded software or hardware/software integration, The core of this book is a collection of templates that were developed and proven in the DoD industry, and are designed to manage integrated testing, failure management and field feedback. Each element is applicable to commercial environments, especially for companies that are manufacturing intelligent network devices, data storage systems and specialty products such as digital control systems, sensors and other integrated hardware/software products.

The templates are introduced in Chapter 1, and each of the seven functional areas covered by the templates are discussed in separate chapters. These functional areas are: integrated testing, failure reporting, design limits, product life, test/analyze/fix process, uniform test reporting and field feedback. A chapter on applying these follows, but the material is slanted towards DoD issues. If you apply thought and imagination while reading this chapter you should get ideas on how to refactor the cases into your own environment.

Section 2 devotes three chapters to software design and test, which are based on the older waterfall development life cycle. However, this particular life cycle lends itself well to developing embedded systems, making this material valid and applicable to commercial environments.

Overall, this is a useful book for the intended audience I cited above if you can track down a copy. In particular, the checklists and overall framework are valuable, and much can be learned from the risk-based approach taken in the book.

The authors pull concepts and recommendations from three Y2k disciplines: program management, business management, and technology management. This is possibly the first time all three disciplines have been presented in a manner such that a company president can understand the real business threat due to lack of Y2k readiness.

Y2K risk management and contingency planning is the hottest Y2K topic right now. Readers need to know about this book, and fast! For example, agencies of the federal government have until April 30 to submit their year 2000 contingency plans in the event of system failures. Why isn't _Y2K Risk Management_ part of the Amazon Millennium Store? According to all the reviewers, this is THE book to read for anyone who needs to mitigate Y2K business and legal risks, and develop a sound contingency plan.

In my presentations on the impact of Year 2000 in healthcare I am often asked to recommend resources. There are only two recommendations I will give and one of them is "Y2K Risk Management" by Steve Goldberg, Steven Davis and Andrew Pegalis. I equate this book to "just in time information." It is precise and right on the money in terms of the final preparations for January 1, 2000. I use it, our Risk Manager uses it and it is appropriate reading for all involved in Y2K preparedness. If I had only one choice, with the time remaining, this book would be it.

I was disappointed after reading 3 chapters of this book. Leafing forward, the book is saturated with SAS examples that I not only cannot understand but do not care about. It seems the whole book was written just to promote the (sold separately)...CD ROM with source SAS code. If you are going to write a SAS book, label it as such.

I have been doing SAS for 11 years. So the SAS code does not bother me.

The best value of this book is that it is very practical; as the title suggests, it is a cookbook. I finished reading about 200 pages in 4 hours and I reviewed it many times when writing SAS coding. If you have deep engineering background, you probably will look for more to dig into after finishing the book. If you are statistical, this is not a book that teachs you how to be rigorous. It is not a book for academidians in any way.

I would rename the title as Data Mining cookbook using SAS software if I can; I concur that the book's value is decisively discounted if the reader does not know SAS software. I, on the other hand, do recommend SAS as a good DM tool.

Logistic Regression From A - Z! This book has it all.

The author lays out clear, concise methodologies to build robust predictive models using SAS. The nice thing is this book lays out the process step by step with SAS code examples. You do not have to be a statistics major to understand how to use the built in SAS functionality.

The modeling methods are unbelievably detailed including topics like defining the objective function, testing variables for predictability using chi squared, fitting continuous variables using the most linear variable transformation format (squared, cubed, cubed root, log, exponent, tangent, sine, cosine, etc... 19 total formats), changing categorical variables to continuous indicator variables for logistic regression use, using stepwise, backward, and score regression methods to further eliminate less predictive variables, defining deciles, and model testing methods like bootstrapping, jackknifing and gains tables to validate the model.

I do not fully understand the mathematical concepts involved throughout the entire process nor do I want to. The book provides a consistent repeatable programming methodology to follow that is broken down into very quantifiable steps.

I would recommend this book for anyone with limited statistical knowledge and a need to understand predictive modeling programming methodologies. Knowledge of the SAS programming language is essential to make full use of this material. The book uses real life examples from the banking, insurance, and marketing industries and contains additional valuable information related to these fields.

I used to use ModSim by CACI on NeXT machine. Now CACI have the easier and PC-compatible, called SimProcess. This book is not only about Simulation sytem, but the great SimProcess user manual. This book is actually a geneal book of Simulation, not a Risk analysis or elses. CD-ROM, come with this book, is the SimProcess. Buy one get another free. But the software can be downloaded from the company website.

The book covers a hot topic, but since the software does not load it's a waste of time. The book should supplement the software for risk anaysis, but with no software this book is a complete waste of money and should not be on the market.

I rated this book earlier as "a reader from Spokane Wa.". I wish to append the earlier statement, and add that you can get current a demo version of @Risk software from Palisade that is outstanding. I was so impressed that I purchased @Risk 4.0 from them, and subsequently ordered a number of other books by Wayne Winston, as well. I think that it would be only fair to retract most of my earlier statement. I understand that they are intending to soon publish a 2nd release of the book with updated software.

Readers should note that until 11/2000 Simulation Modeling Using @RISK was shipped with an older version of the @RISK software. Customer reviews that reference software problems are all reviews of this older edition of the book. The current edition ships with @RISK 4.0; software that supports all newer versions of Excel and Windows. The text has been entirely updated to reflect this newest version of @RISK.

This book describes how the US mortgage and credit card industries approach modeling, from the industry standard practioners point of view. It is best read by those familiar with the industry. It ignores the potential of current thinking outside industry standard practices. However, everyone interested in the subect needs to know the way FICO does it; they are the standard.

I agree with everyone else, but they are comming from a different point of view than the person that would benefit from this book.

This book is very nicely done for the beginner who wants to read his first book on credit risk.

Even for me I found some information in it that was extremely beneficial; it will probbaly save our corporation a great deal of money.

The title says "Design and Application"; the book serves the title very well. Concise, loaded with different angles. Some writers' names are big in other fields. Surprisingly, a good economist's review is also included, Mark Z's. I once reviewed about 90 relevant publications in the credit scoring field for my thesis project. One impression was the literature was fragmented and heavily European oriented. This book clearly interests me more as it relates to American experience more.

The title does not say "Theory and application". So I don't complain about its "lack of substance". I don't believe either it is for beginners. Design is related to science, but design is often more an art than science; I don't expect it to be a theoretic tome. It is more like a "programmer's pocket book". So certain level of prerequistion and experience will max out the benefits for the reader.

I look forward to seeing another update.

unfortunately this book does not deliver what it promisses. neither i find any theoretical in-depth analysis of specific software project failures nor reasonable checklists to guide practioners. instead, many common places that do not add value compared to the publications on the topic so far (Boehm, Jones, etc.).
it does not help that the book fails to describe the problems that make specifically software projects so hard to manage. see the freely available NATO software engineering conference papers from 1968 for more helpful information on software project failures.

Software development failures, depending on how you count, may outnumber the successes. Nearly a third of software projects are simply scrapped before completion. That waste may account for as much as US$85 billion, approaching 1% of the US gross domestic product. This topic is critical, in a world where everything, down to the pacemaker in a patient's chest, is driven by software.

A topic so important deserves a more stirring author than Ewusi-Mensah. I found this book dry, repetitive, and poorly organized. The book centers on a handful of case studies. Those case studies are barely mentioned until chapter four, though. Even then, I found it hard to follow the examples. The author does not present the samples one at a time, in their entirety, though. Instead, he presents one aspect of all five examples, then another facet of all five, and so on. Only in chapter seven, when the book is winding down, do I really see any depth in any of the case studies. Even then, just one is covered in any detail.

Ewusi-Mensah rightly describes the "code of silence" surrounding software project failure. His description the phenomenom seems shallow, though. Bruised egos and painful memories may well be part of the reason that failures get so little mention. Software training and practice may have more to do with the tendency to ignore failure, though. In every other field of engineering, practioners rely on knowing yield strengths and "absolute maximum" ratings of their parts and materials. The idea of failure is central to the practice, even to the legalities and forensics, of those fields. Programmers, though, are barely ever shown good examples of their craft, let alone bad examples. Management, design, and project control of software are even more ethereal - there simply is no common set of terms in which the failure can be described.

Petroski's writings show that engineering failures can be described in informative, constructive ways. Perhaps this book's target is more difficult - it discusses not the failures of the software itself, so much as failures in the process by which software is built. Perhaps, too, not every author can be a Petroski. Maybe the academic treatment really is more appropriate to this topic. If so, I would hope for an author who cites more of the field's literature and cites less of his own prior work.

Here's a two-ingredient recipe for disaster: take a big organization and mix in ambitious plans for a state-of-the-art software system. The disaster already happened at the IRS and Denver International Airport, both victims of software development missteps. Such failures are common, costly and all-too-avoidable, writes academic Kweku Ewusi-Mensah. While his prose can be dry, the examples he uses prove quite juicy. A little common sense could have saved the IRS billions and the Denver airport millions. Both fell victim to surprisingly basic pitfalls, such as unclear or unrealistic goals and over optimistic expectations that inexperienced people could get the job done. Ewusi-Mensah convincingly argues that organizations need to share such learning experiences, although he acknowledges that would mark a reversal from common practice. We recommend this book to managers and engineers involved in developing software. This cautionary tale could save your neck.