In an interesting twist, MySpace makes the news today. Motherboard reports on hackers claims about having 427 million MySpace passwords. There are some questions about the actual source of the data and when it was retrieved. Bill Jordan talks about the coming crisis in software development. His target is mostly on low quality applications built… Read More Geek Reading May 31, 2016 #1117
Technologists have a tendency to focus on the technologies being used during a project. Many people would use the newest or most hyped technologies in order to stay ahead, or even just to use it as a learning experience. I have been in the software development industry long enough to know that technology is not… Read More Theories And Technologies Are Not Solutions
I was first introduced to outsourcing many years ago when dealing with a client that liked using an Indian consulting company. At that time, around the late 90’s, the company was using purely waterfall development processes and agile was really just getting some publicity. My job was to translate business requirements into functions specifications that… Read More Agile And The Art Of Outsourcing
Lately, I have been struggling with some of the management side of projects. The concepts of estimates, deadlines and work completed do not always align in ways that make people happy. The problems with estimates and deadlines had pushed me closer to agile methods before, but not all projects can be run in the manner… Read More The Conflict Between Estimates, Deadlines And A Working Product
I love when other people write a blog post at the same time you are struggling with the problem that they describe. Today’s timely post comes from Michael Bolton on his DevelopSense blog. In “The Undefinition of Done”, Michael talks about the fact that people typically have different definitions: One issue, as I’ve pointed out before,… Read More When Do You Say A Development Task Is Really Done?
The topic of what is a software developer’s job comes up quite often. Obviously, they are paid to write code, but that is a very narrow definition. As a developer gets more senior, they are asked to design the various components of a system, instead of just coding a task. With agile development, the idea… Read More A Developer’s Job Mirrors The Project Lifecycle
If you talk to a programmer, almost all software sucks, even the programs they wrote a few months ago. This is typically due to changing technology, increased knowledge or even a market shift. The software you wrote may have been a good idea when you started, but does it serve the correct purpose now? Even… Read More Re-Engineering In Agile Development Can Just Be Refactoring
This post is inspired by a question on LinkedIn but I felt required a full blog post to really explain the answer. There are plenty of companies that still develop their applications using the traditional waterfall model, or even a complete lack of formalized processes. This is somewhat surprising considering the amount of information available… Read More How To Succeed With Scrum When Your Company Is Anti-Agile
As a software engineer, I was trained to think about the worst case. What is the worst possible performance for the algorithm used as specified in O(n), “big Oh“, notation? If you had formal education in computer science, you have been asked this question. Given that we are supposed to think about the worst case,… Read More How Can Software Development Avoid The Need For A Hero?
Over the past week, there has been an interesting thread being talked about in software development. It started with a blog post by Ted Neward where he quoted Billy Hollis as saying: Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease. Here, the agile being talked about is a reference to agile software development processes. Agile… Read More Process Rarely Fixes The Problem
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