Silly stuff

What Rumsfeld said is actually a well known, and very accurate, tenet of project management.

Example: we start a project to install software on an existing server. We know that we do not know if the server can handle the load (i.e. it is a known unknown). Because it is a known unknown, we plan to do testing to investigate the issue and we prepare contingency plans in case the server is inadequate and, one way or another, we make it through the project OK.

Suppose also that we assume the software to be good but, in fact, the software has problems as the load on it increases. This is an unknown unknown, we don’t know if the software will scale and we don’t know that we don’t know. For this reason we do not do testing of the software for load and we have no contingency plans in place for software scaling issues. If this “unknown unknown” blows up on us we are completely screwed at the last minute with no contingency planning to bail us out.

While the known unknown is something any decent project manager can muddle through, the unknown unknown puts us into crisis mode.

There are lots of reasons to criticize Rumsfeld but this quote is not one of them.

BTW: it’s just an example to make a point; no one needs to lecture me on actual software testing processes.