Competitive Engineering (Gilb 2005) is a dense book that describes an agile process for project management that is different to that typically used by the typical agile manifesto.
This is an older process that tries to replace what would have been described as waterfall development with something practical. The book has a lot of great ideas but is not an easy read. It is especially challenging as most of the book uses a semi-formal language called planguage to define itself. It does not limit itself to software projects.
Lets break the big ideas down in reverse order.
10. Evolutionary Project Management.
The idea here is that you can break any large project down into a series of small steps that each deliver some value. Typically each step should only cost no more ghan 2% of the total budget.
9. Impact Estimation
A technique for comparing design ideas numerically against a fixed set of requirements.
8. Specification Quality Control.
A technique of inspection of documents against defined rules.
7. Design Ideas and Design Engineering
How to find an specify design ideas
6. Resources Budgets and Costs
Resource requirements
5. Scales of measure
A great technique for making everything measurable.
4. Performance
How to turn performance attributes into numbers.
3. Functions
This is what the system must do.
2. Requirement Specification
Outline of targets and constraints.
1 Planguage and process control
Intro to Planguage.
This book was written at a time when you actually had a mantained specification document alongside a system. I have only ever seen this in use once on a large project near the start of my career.
I have used some of these techniques to help choose between design alternatives. The whole process is too big to use for “small” tasks.
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