Information Technology Dark Side

Matt Heusser and I were discussing his upcoming Workshop on Technical Debt, at which I hope to be speaking in August, and we came up with several interesting ways that technical debt is created. Hacks create technical debt by ignoring principles of good software development in favor of quick, easy fixes This is the obvious [...]

[Read more →]

A few days ago I overheard someone talking about outsourcing. At one point, they said “it’s hard to outsource innovation.” I couldn’t help snickering at this – it’s probably just as hard to insource innovation. In fact, it may be harder. Corporate IT is, by its very nature, a barrier to innovation. This is true [...]

[Read more →]

BizTech magazine just published a best practices article of mine about keeping projects out of trouble. I did my best to promote principles that I think are consistent with agile values – I hope I pulled it off. Check it out and let me know what you think.

[Read more →]

A few weeks ago I would have thought this was an obvious question. But then I stirred up a hornet’s nest by asking a group of testers to identify common myths about software testing. The ensuing discussion was heated, interesting, and sometimes insulting. Some people became offended, and great rifts were born between some of [...]

[Read more →]

There is a movement in software development that I call the contract-driven serial development movement. There are two distinguishing characteristics of software development lifecycles created by proponents of this movement: 1) the definition of deliverables in contractual form and 2) the delivery of deliverables in phases (i.e. requirements, design, construction, etc.). I suppose you could [...]

[Read more →]

Most risk management approaches work something like this: 1) Keep a list of risks 2) Estimate the likelihood the risk will occur (call it X) 3) Estimate the cost the risk will create if it occurs (call it Y) 4) X times Y is supposed to tell you something useful – it might be the [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s part of an email I received last week about project planning from a reader named Melinda: I was wondering….would you be able to post an article about the Art of designing a good project plan. There are tons of books on using MS Project and tons of Books on PMP concepts (initialize, plan…etc), but [...]

[Read more →]

A while back I blogged about the five different ways we subconsciously evaluate each other’s competence. It’s been on my mind ever since, especially since I have recently changed assignments and teams. Developing competence in my new problem space as quickly as possible is very important to me right now, and I’ve been attacking the [...]

[Read more →]

A few days ago I blogged about five ways we intuitively evaluate each other’s competency. Fluency, the ability to use the vocabulary of the project comfortably, is one of the most important. Without fluency, it’s hard to move on to comprehension, expression, and nuance. If you can’t speak the language of the project, you won’t [...]

[Read more →]

I tend not to use specialists on my projects. I generally find I don’t need business analysts, testers, designers, etc. The exception is performance testing – I need a specialist for that. I can imagine scenarios where I would bring in dedicated testers or analysts, but these are exception scenarios, not the norm. I’ve been [...]

[Read more →]