Improving the world with software
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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from 2006
50 essays from 2006
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The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) does it again…
The Software Engineering Institute gave us CMMI, but they haven’t stopped “helping” the software industry. Their report on “Documenting Software Architectures in an Agile World“(PDF alert) tries to define the difference between Agile-prone and Architecture-prone software projects. They tell us that agile requires you not to document architecture (I did not know that…), and later …
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The different values of software features, 9 different examples
A few days ago I posted an entry about the different layers of value in a software feature. Today I ran into an excellent example of the differences between a system that focuses on what I called immediate value (Mac OS X) and another that clearly focuses on what I called expert value. Take a …
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Quality is not just being “bug-free”, it is being “valuable”
The value of a software feature/product can be divided into 4 layers. When you code a feature you probably think immediately about the “technical value”, i.e. the technological improvement/innovation you are about to implement or algorithm/method. But it does not stop there. The expert user will find in it “expert value”, this is what a …
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Simple software is not simplistic software! Joel and Norman are wrong
Joel and Norman state several things regarding simplicity in their respective blog, but what they say can be summarized in a simple syllogism (pun intended): People like the products with more features All products with more features have more controls in the User Interfacea are less simple Therefore: People want products that are less simple …
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Is Apple the new “geek”?
As I type this blog entry in my new MacBook Pro, I’m thinking that Mac is the new “geek”.Apple products have become more and more attractive to those of us that have worked or played with computers since a young age. It’s no longer only for the Advertising/Design or Publishing industry. Macs are getting affordable …
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Egineering truths, how to make better engineering decisions
Often in an engineering problem software developers tend to try and find the perfect solution and quickly fall in love with one idea that may work or then shoot down ideas that could work but not in all hypothetical circumstances (even if they are realistically not possible). Many discussions I’ve attended could have been cut …
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Big Design Upfront = Design-in-progress = Less Productivity = Lost Money
Henrik Mårtenson has an excellent post on Design-in-progress (similar to work-in-progress in Lean Manufacturint). Really worth a read!
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You cannot inspect quality into a document!
Inspections are a failed analogy.SEI writes in the page about software inspection: Software inspections provide value in improving reliability, availability, and maintainability. They don’t mention however that inspections improve reliability, availability and maintainability of the inspected artifact. In most software companies the inspected artifacts are: documents. This means that instead of improving the software itself …
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Another interesting Agile Finland Seminar
Yesterday another Agile Finland seminar was held in Helsinki. There were 3 speakers and the guest star of the day was Tom Gilb. Tom has been working in this field for many years and pitches himself as a precursor of the agile movement. He mentions “iterations” as something that he popularized in one of his …
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Best practices are not the best at all!
I sometimes get tired of listening to people talk about best-practices, and today is one of those days! Deming a long time ago started pitching the idea of continuous improvement, back when the Japanese were the only ones willing to listen to him. In his now famous “plan-do-study-act” cycle (PDSA) he popularized the feedback and …
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A Seminar about Agile implications for old-school project managers
On November 14th, 2006 I’ll be speaking at a seminar about the implications of Agile on the lives of old-school project managers. The old-school project management is still probably the widest used approach to software project management and I tried to explain it’s core values here and here. My talk in the seminar will focus …
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Is the military getting “software development” ?
James Bach is a well known test specialist that has espoused Agile software development since the beginning. Even though the testing community is still searching for consensus (which may not even be a good thing) James is definitely quite ahead of the pack. His latest post on testing in the military is very “to the …
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