Project Failure Analysis Patterns (Part 1)
Recall from my motivation for this pattern series the analogy between the following entities:
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Computer Application/Process - Team
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Thread of activity - Team member
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Operating system - Company organization and management
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Computer system - Company organization and management plus teams
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User process dump - Team state snapshot
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Kernel memory dump - Organization state snapshot
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Complete memory dump - Organization state plus teams internal state snapshot
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Exception - Fault, mistake
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Crash or hang - Failure
The first pattern is called Multiple Faults and it is a direct mapping from application crash analysis Multiple Exceptions pattern. The running instance of a computer application (process) can experience multiple exceptions from different execution threads before it hangs or crashes. The latter causes the process to disappear from external observers watching Task Manager. The same can be true for any functional team. Multiple faults from different team members can happen and if a team fails we shouldn’t attribute the overall failure to just one member’s fault that is on a surface but look for other possible mistakes too.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -