Software industry zealots focus far too much effort on debating methodology for methodologies sake.
How Do Committees Invent? is a 1968 paper by Melvin Conway, where he describes a social phenomenon later transliterated into the Conway's Law adage by Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. The essence…
Dark clouds of thought were unproven examples Of the principle of doubt transforming the future They assumed the management of progress As psychic discipline for fools and thieves Readily…
Rowan has posted a summary of the Trade Me Manifesto, which in turn, was influenced by Google's Corporate Philosophy. Much of it should be plain common sense, except for the fact that so many…
Last year, I picked up this curious book which seemed to sum up the zeitgeist of web programming in 2005 - an interesting and polemical twist from O'Reilly
There is a story about a senior England player who was asked to speak at a corporate seminar soon after the 2003 World Cup. He spoke the day after Woodward had spoken to the same audience and was…
I recently heard of a situation where a project was completed ahead of schedule, on time and under budget. Much of this was that the person running it didn't bother waiting for pointless meetings…
Dog Bites Man Month. Or does it? The criticism is sharp, but I'm not sure how deep it cuts. Anecdotal evidence is no less valid than statistical reasoning if it is widely understood to be advice that…
There is an interesting case for agile development of infrastructure, applying lessons learned from the software world to civil engineering projects. This is a useful metaphor, but there is an…
In Hearing without listening, 37Signals screws up, then admits what they did wrong and how they fixed it. In the end, it's just a matter of several weeks downtime before the application is working…
Francis Till comes down full fist slinging on Governments & Open Source, which turns out to be little more than another thinly veiled attack on the Green Party. Beyond the hot air and apparent…
Software development is hard. A lot of people like the idea of couching this difficulty in a form of explanation by analogy. The most common comparisons are generally the most facile and glib, and…
In the last 30 years neuroscience has given us great insight into the workings of the human brain and as more information emerges, it becomes clear just how out of step with reality conventional attitudes…
"Agile" has balkanized, and the individual cults have - in some cases - become religions that are just as bad as the things they intended to replace. But at the outset, the interesting thing about…
Raganwald dissects the misguided metaphor from a software process perspective. I have come to believe that these kinds of problems are even more prevalent in the web development world than in…
This piece landed in my inbox twice today, and immediately caught my attention. It's well written, and makes some excellent points that I think are exactly on the mark. Paul Graham has elaborated…