A colleague at work was recently asked to gather requirements from his users before progressing some clever ideas he had about some of our products. He responded with a Henry Ford quote from many years ago: ”If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. I found myself agreeing with him, [...]
Archive for the 'Software Process' Category
Generic Isn’t Always Better
17Aug09I saw a tweet recently that read ‘Use of “general” and “flexible” are design meeting smells’. The truth is, words like “generic”, “general”, and “flexible” are pretty loaded words. Like the words “architect”, and “agile”, these words have different meaning to different people and unfortunately are very often misused. The word generic is also a [...]
Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons speak about the challenges of Enterprise Architecture in agile environments: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/agilists-and-architects
Throw-it-Over-the-Wall-Mentality
03Jun09I’ve struggled with this throughout my career, but it’s never made sense to me until recently. A colleague said something about operating in isolated environments so that one skill-set does not influence another skill-set. He was referring specifically to analysts not having access to development resources so that the requirements gathered from the client are [...]
I’ve read 2 articles recently about technical debt: one by Martin Fowler, and one by Max Pool on Codesqueeze. I particularly agree with Max’s idea that if you ‘Make your case, and show the business value, the majority of the time you will get that signature for the refactor’. I always hear developers blaming management [...]
I’ve heard a few arguments recently siding on either top-down or bottom-up design. I’ve heard some agreement on a need for both. My opinion resides in the second category. Both are required for different reasons, but both are required in almost every context. Top-down design is very valuable because it allows us to look at [...]
I was about to come up with a list of books and blogs for a colleague that capture Agile & Best Practice Software Development, and I found these: Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers (Q3 2008) They very closely align with my interests and I believe the lists [...]
I wrote recently about transparency being key in software development. I think that another way to move in this general direction is to concentrate on letting the business drive your process sometimes too. Our customers don’t need to know much about software development in order to help us develop software that adds a ton of [...]
Embrace the Skills
10Aug08I tend to spend my time as a software developer taking in anything I can get my hands on – The old ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ adage. While I appreciate opportunities that exercise various skills (and develop new ones when possible), I find it very difficult to multi-task as a developer. Developers [...]
Most people who have worked with me have heard me preach about the importance of transparency. There is an old-school tendency in IT to view software as some sort of ‘magic’. Those paying for the software prefer to look at it this way, because it means that they are not expected to understand it. Those [...]
