Information Technology Dark Side

I recorded a webcast with SearchSoftwareQuality.com last week titled “Introducing Agile in a Waterfall World: Guerilla Tactics for Better Project Management.” It was, in lots of ways, my final act as a member of the Dark Side of Technology. As I have now returned to the other side of the force, I don’t really have [...]

[Read more →]

That’s what my family and I decided was best, so last Friday I resigned from my position as an IT project manager at Liberty Mutual Agency Markets. My last day is October 31 (kind of a fitting day to leave corporate IT, which I’ve labeled the technology dark side!).
Starting November 3, my moonlighting job will [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s a common problem in software development: you’re production application has sensitive/personal/private/legally protected data in it that probably isn’t wise to share with everybody and their dog. But, you need to debug a problem from prod, test a database upgrade, verify a new feed works properly, or some other task that would really be a [...]

[Read more →]

Jurgen Appelo, a nice guy in the Netherlands and author of noop.nl , recently sent me an email about a list he compiled: the top 100 blogs for development managers. He compiled the list based on lots of factors, including page rank, nominations, activity, and technorati rank, which he explains as part of the post.
Reading [...]

[Read more →]

Mike Kelly and I co-authored an article on testing in an agile project that was just posted today. Check it out and let us know what you think.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

[Read more →]

This is a followup from my earlier post, Software Development: Art, Craft, or Science. I initially sent it out to the attendees of the Workshop on Technical Debt, since it was discussed there. I thought I’d post it here as well.
Anyone can behave with professionalism, regardless of whether they are engaged in a profession or [...]

[Read more →]

Is software development a science?
I was required, as a Mechanical Engineering major, to take a C class on solving math problems with software. We didn’t talk about design patterns, or interfaces, or even clean code. We talked about theories of convergence and divergence, of Newton-Raphson, and progressively better guessing. Our work was judged based on [...]

[Read more →]

Your Job Stinks but You Can’t Leave, What to Do?
It can be a desperate feeling; you’re making just enough money to be fairly comfortable but you hate your job. What should you do? You almost don’t want to rock the boat by interviewing for new jobs because you don’t want to perpetuate the [...]

[Read more →]

Most career advice sucks at least 50% of the time. Context matters when it comes to advice because most career problems aren’t simple enough for generalities to work very often. Buy a house. Have kids. Don’t lease cars. Good advice? Sometimes, not always. For career advice to be really useful, it has to context imperial. [...]

[Read more →]

I’m pretty much allergic to any form of requirements documentation. Change control makes my skin itch, and big up front planning makes me vomit. But I also am not totally comfortable with winging it all the time. As a project manager, I need to get a sense of how big the project is, what are [...]

[Read more →]