SPaMCAST 34 - Armour, Estimation Ain't Planning, Not The Same

Show 34 is the beginning of my interview with Phil Armour.  I am calling this interview, “Estimation Ain’t Planning”.  I must admit that I have been quoting this interview since I taped it.  Amazingly powerful concepts, so powerful I decided to revisit estimation. Phillip G. Armour is VP for Systems Development and a Senior Consultant at Corvus International Inc. Phil has been developing software for over thirty-five years.  He has been a programmer, analyst, project manager, DBA, systems architect, process engineer, metrics engineer, consultant, and executive coach and has worked for organizations as diverse as United Airlines, Motorola, Argonne National Laboratory, General Dynamics, the IRS, the premier software consulting company in India, and the largest cellular service provider in Central West Africa.  In the last fifteen years, Phil has personally taught software development techniques and management principles to over 20,000 developers, engineers, managers, and executives.   Phil’s primary professional focus is currently in two related areas: software project estimation and software technical team development.   Since 2000, Phil has been a contributing editor on ACM’s flagship magazine “Communications of the ACM” and writes a regular column entitled “The Business of Software” where he explores issues to do with the nature and challenges of modern software.  He has been on the extended faculty at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and the Mendoza School of Business at the University of Notre Dame.    Phil is also the author of “The Laws of Software Process” published by Auerbach in 2003.  He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and the Project Management Institute.   Telephone:      (847)-438-1609Fax:               (847)-438-1638Email:               The essay is titled “Estimation, Planning and Goals: All Different I Say!”.   The essay explores the confusion of words used in project planning and control.  The essay may be due to my long-term issue with a how words are used and misused, false levels of precision or just the fact that the process relating to the software engineering disciplines like estimation continue to prove to be difficult to implement regardless of the development method used.  The text of the essay can be found at .  Comments and corrections are welcome. There are a number of ways to share your thoughts .  Email SPaMCAST at  Voice messages can be left at 1-206-888-6111 Twitter – BLOG – Future Events and the next . . . Conference season is beginning! I will be speaking at IFPUG’s 3rd Annual ISMA Conference and Fall Workshops Sunday, September 14 – Friday, September 19, 2008 at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel information at .  The presentation is call “Counting Facebook” and will be on Friday September 19, 2008 at 10:25 AM - 11:25 AM, I am speaking at Quest Toronto 2008 Conference, September 22- 26, 2008, at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto, Canada.  I will be presenting “Good Numbers Go Bad” on Wed Sept 24th from 1:30 - 2:30 pm and also joining in as a subject matter expert in the end of day solutions workshop.  Information can be found at Finally I will be speaking at the Northeast Quality Council 57th Conference.  The conference is scheduled for October 14 – 15 , 2008 in Marlborough, Massachusetts at Best Western Royal Plaza.   The presentation is titled “One Size Fits . . .Someone Other Than Me”.  Information can be found at . Next Software Process and Measurement Cast: On the next SPaMCAST I will interview Charlene Li of Forrester Research, co-author of “”.  We talked about opinion how are social networks and strategies rewriting the organization and its relations to its customers.