[lazyant]

I didn't care especially for the technical details, what I like about this article is that the first thing they mention is the success criteria of the project (hopefully it was done at the very beginning, before any implementation). Then on top of that, they created an automated tool to verify such criteria automatically and objectively.

This is a great approach and unfortunately I don't think many (most?) software projects start out like that.

Not defining conditions of victory and scope creep are possibly the biggest risks in software projects.

[chiefalchemist]

It's not only software.

1) What is the goal? What defines success?

2) What are the KPI's? How are we going to measure it?

These are baseline questions to any endeavor of substance. Yet, they are rarely defined.

[vlovich123]

It’s also important to remember that not everything worth doing or every “success” state you set can have KPIs defined (either actually impossible or the science may not be there yet).

[chiefalchemist]

To clarify, I was using KPI in the abstract. That is, how do I/we define success? What does it look like? How will we know if we are or we're not?