Many people want to try agile software development techniques but they just can’t convince enough other people in the company to give them a try. Making the situations more complex, even if most agree that agile development is the way to go, they can’t agree on which agile techniques to apply — Scrum, Kanban, XP, […]
I don’t know about you but I like Halloween. It’s fun. Kids get to wear costumes and collect candy. Adults get to engage in fantasies of their own and eat the leftover candy (along with some of the candy their kids collect). It can be scary for some but it’s all in good fun. Software […]
It’s time to blow up the Information Technology (IT) department as we know it. It has outlived its usefulness and over-stayed its welcome. It just doesn’t work any more. Say goodbye. The proponents of agile development, devops and Scrum, myself included, are getting no where fast. It’s not the fault of IT departments per se. […]
Watching an NFL football game and seeing my favorite team lose as a direct result of the officiating got me thinking about the effect of too much management intervention in software development. So here’s what happened. I was watching the (NFL) football game on Sunday between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. […]
Much of the cost in any custom software system lies in wait, hiding until after the initial development is complete. I write regularly about software development offering my opinions about how to do it better, faster and cheaper. Yet, even getting the initial development cost to zero may not save a company much money over […]
Here’s a simple question — what does your customer expect? Do you know the answer? Many software development teams don’t. They may think they know. They may infer that customers want timely delivery and high quality — reasonable assumptions though rather broad. Every customer has different expectations arrived at in different ways. Regardless of how […]
Ad hoc requests. We don’t like them. You’re in the midst of working on a scheduled task. You’re working hard, trying to get the job done in the allotted time. Then suddenly, it strikes — the ad hoc request. They come in many forms. Here are a few examples of how they arrive: “Oh, I […]
Software developers and cooks have something in common. You see, there are essentially two types of cooks: 1) Those who carefully follow recipes in order to recreate a dish or dessert; and 2) Those who use recipes as guides while preferring to adapt them to suit their tastes. Similarly, some software developers like to follow […]
Enterprise-scale companies invest a lot of time and money in preserving and protecting what works — or more correctly, what they believe works. It’s this preserve-and-protect mentality that makes switching software development approaches so difficult. After having invested so much in training, documentation and tools for software development, these companies are understandably reluctant to make […]