Lau­rent Bossavit says in passing

@Vaguery I’ve been toy­ing with the idea of build­ing sim­u­la­tions of sw projects for years now, & looked at Abdel Hamid’s work, but it’s hard.

— Lau­rent Bossavit (@Morendil) March 3, 2012

This is an inter­est­ing propo­si­tion, but hav­ing looked over the work of Abdel-​​Hamid a bit, I’m won­der­ing if we might con­sider a more agent-​​based approach.

The orga­ni­za­tional behav­ior and systems-​​dynamics frame­work we see in that cor­pus is admirable and inter­est­ing, but one has to admit it’s focused on aggre­gate behav­iors of “devel­op­ers” and “man­age­ment” observed from the stand­point of a cor­po­rate plan­ner stake­holder. I don’t feel obliged to have that con­ver­sa­tion any more.

What does one want to explore? The things that set apart agile projects from inag­ile ones, I sup­pose: Risks of the many modes of fail­ure; adapt­abil­ity; scal­ing; work load; busi­ness value deliv­ery rates and prob­a­bil­i­ties; sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence; knowl­edge shar­ing; some­thing about the many stake­hold­ers (“man­age­ment”, “team”, “cus­tomer”, “users”)?

All pos­si­ble. I’ve had some inci­den­tal con­ver­sa­tions with Ron and Chet about this, too, over the years. Maybe it’s time to pur­sue it a lit­tle ways….

But what does one want to compare?

Who are you, and what do you want?