Roscoe s Second Picture


Roscoe's Second Picture

"Here's the path that manager would take," he said, as he drew Figure 5.2.

Figure 5.2. Roscoe's second drawinglong vectors.


"Note that in this case, as in the first one, we have made the simplifying assumption that the target doesn't move, although we know it always does," he added.

I noticed immediately that L1 was in the same wrong direction as S1 in the previous diagram, and I pointed that out to Roscoe. "Sure, they both get off to the same bad start because of errors in aim and execution. But notice that Mr. Long Vector, as I like to call him, stays on the deviant path much longer."

It was also true that, at the first correction point, both Mr. Short Vector and Mr. Long Vector made the same wrong "guess" for their second direction; L2 and S2 are basically in the same direction. But once again, Mr. Long Vector persisted too long before making a correction.

"Now, let's measure all three paths," Roscoe said. "The dotted line comes out to 10 inches. Let's see...hmm...L1-L2-L3 comes out to about 15 inches. And S1-S2-S3-S4-S5-S6-S7 comes out, let's see, to around 12 inches. So Mr. Short Vector is 20 percent longer than optimum, and Mr. Long Vector is 50 percent longer than optimum."




The Software Development Edge(c) Essays on Managing Successful Projects
The Software Development Edge(c) Essays on Managing Successful Projects
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 269

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