Information Technology Dark Side

Yesterday Brian Marick tweeted that he had “Realized one reason I’m suspicious of current trend toward visionary leaders guiding Agile adoption: it’s a single point of failure.” This was the one reason my attempt to introduce Agile at my previous job ultimately failed in spite of being really quite successful at quickly and cheaply delivering [...]

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The vast majority of open source projects are horizontals – they solve a general type of problem rather than a specific problem itself. There are open source document management systems, open source content management systems, open source office productivity systems. Hopefully you get the idea. But how many open source insurance policy systems are there? [...]

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Eleven years ago I sat behind my first post-college desk. On it sat a Sun SPARC 20 workstation, a powerful Unix machine, with a 21″ CRT monitor above it and a 3D input device beside it. I don’t remember what the input device was called – it was a round ball you could push, pull, [...]

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“Waterfall software development lifecycles have terrorized technology projects in this state for too long,” Governor Mitch Daniels said at a simple signing ceremony held at a meeting of the Central Indiana chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). “This bill will end the tyranny of big upfront planning, big upfront design, and litigation style change [...]

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Today is the first day of a two-day workshop on exploratory testing that Mike Kelly and I put together. I’m really excited about it because the course itself has a very unique presentation approach, inspired by Matt Heusser, and because it has a very heavy emphasis on hands-on practice. Participants will be testing and creating [...]

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Here’s another recent email question: Hello David, I am just checking with you to find out what your perspective is on “code reviews” in a Scrum environment? Generally it seems that I see that the discussion on this leans toward paired programming and test driven development to meet this need. But I would be very [...]

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I recently got involved in an email list discussion about exploratory testing. I thought I’d post one of my comments here: I think it’s worth noting that for most terms there is a difference between practice and theory in the way they are used. So, while I call the part of my projects (I’m a [...]

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I have great sympathy for the business organizations that utilize services from corporate IT groups. It’s not easy to make an IT project successful just because of the complex nature of software systems. Specialization and centralization of resources, which are practically IT “best practices” these days according to the popular literature, only makes things works. [...]

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Alexey over at OneYoxel has a couple of interesting posts following up on Tate’s post “The Demise of Gantt Charts in Agile Projects”. I recommend you check it out. Here’s a quote I enjoyed. In its traditional sense as a static master plan of your project I would agree, there is not much value in [...]

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OK, I’ve had enough; it’s time for another rant. Once again I find myself bewildered and befuddled by the sound and fury of the Agilistas as they seek to dethrone the PiMPs. Tell me something all you clever people out there, if Agile is sooo good, why has it not taken over the entire industry [...]

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