…(Administration) covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to […]
Lessons from Math – II
What makes a good mathematician? I suspect that a common response would be a strong intellect, but another common response would be a great deal of self-discipline. After all, a […]
Lessons from Math – I
Yesterday, I suggested a topic of “Testing Lessons from Mathematics.” Yet in my recent work, I’m becoming much more holistic about software. If I find a particularly interesting point that […]
Testing Lessons from Mathematics – Intro
You may not know it, but there are a whole bunch of things that are lumped into Math, somewhat haphazardly. Statistics, for example, could fit well in the business school […]
"Getting the Requirements Right Up Front"
Brian Marick posted this to the Agile-Testing Yahoo Group Today. I thought it was interesting … 1. It’s the job of the team to be able to respond well to […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – IV
Yesterday I suggested that a lot of process improvement is trying to eliminate the overlap between roles. For example, when people talk about making job descriptions “better”, that is often […]
Blogger Etiquette?
Someone mirrored one of my posts from earlier this week – http://managerspeaks.blogspot.com/2007/02/rethinking-process-improvement.html At the bottom, he wrote “link”, linking to Creative Chaos. Otherwise, I would think the material was his. […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – III
If software development is an assembly line, then unclear roles is a real problem (see illustration.) You don’t know who is supposed to tightnen the nut. It might be tightend […]
A Box Of A Different Color
Better Software Magazine published by artilce “A Box of a Different Color” this month If you like this blog, you would probably enjoy Better Software. They have a free trial […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – II
This is image 2 from Winston Royce’s Paper – “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems“ Let’s look at each stage for the process – requirements, design, coding, testing … […]
Solid presentation advice …
Suggestions and Examples of What Not to Submit 1. Attendees are paying to take classes—they don’t want to hear a sales pitch, no matter how thickly veiled. Please do not […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – I
Most of our ideas about process improvement come from a factory analogy – which was Invented by Frederick W. Taylor at the beginning of the 20th century. His idea was […]
Blue Man Group – I
First, some background. I submit that there are currently two very big extremes in the world of software conferences: Death by Powerpoint and Open Spaces. The Death By PowerPoint Conferences […]
Non-Functional Testing?
There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Association For Software Testing discussion list on non-functional testing. Basically, Danny Faught thinks the term is weak and is looking for alternatives. […]
HP Culture, Circa 1976
Wozniak:”No, I’m never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It’s my job for life. It’s the best company because it’s so good to engineers.” It really treated us like we were a […]
Errata
I’m pretty buried in side projects right now, but I did want to get a few things out. First, I found this bit from Joel Spolsky, excerpted from the book […]
Against Systems – IV
I’ve been looking for a way to wrap this up, when I stumbled accross and article titled “Process as a Substitute for Competance” that seems to do it for me […]
… I was wrong
A few weeks ago I put out a post on Elisabeth Henricksen’s 2002 presentation, “Why Are My Pants On Fire?”. My conclusion was that the sentiment was obvious, but people […]
Against Systems: Interlude …
More Against Systems to come, but first, a couple of things … 1) Jon Kohl points out that we only exist because of little systems like circulation, muscular, the solar […]
Against Systems – III
Did you know that honor codes that consist of a specific list can be gamed? For example, the US Air Force Academy Honor Code, at one time, was: “We shall […]