The Mindset

Yesterday, I wrote about ten software development myths, which unfortunately are still around. In his comment to my post, Tim King wisely argued that the ten myths I had listed were all big-company myths.
Tim, I know you said you are going to write your own top-ten small-company myths and misconceptions, but I just couldn’t resist […]

Today, I’m going to start with the bottom line: we still have a long way to go.
No, there’s nothing new about it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know all about the misconceptions and myths the software industry suffers from. But today wasn’t any ordinary day, because today I had the […]

A car is a wonderful tool. It can get you from one place to another quite effortlessly (well, assuming the two places are within reasonable distance). For most of us, cars are cost-effective and convenient. They serve their purpose amazingly well, at least until some higher form of transportation emerges.
There’s a lot to consider when […]

Stop whatever it is you’re doing. There’s a new buzz in town.
In our ultra-dynamic industry, yesterday’s Holy Grail is today’s old news. A couple of days ago I wrote about Googlism as the new emerging religion, and what do you know, I’ve just discovered the signs of a new one, already creeping into blogs, articles, […]

In a recent article, James Shore describes the dynamics in the CardMeeting project.

“All of these things would have been good things to fix. In particular, implementing tests would actually have made us faster, and it would have only taken a week or two at most to figure out how to use TDD in our UI- […]

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”                                 George Bernard Shaw
Here’s a fictional scenario. It takes place in a project postmortem session. The product manager looks in his papers or dashboards and says something like “We had too many defects in this project”. The developers […]

Dear CEO,
This post is for you (but the rest of you readers are welcome to read on as well).
Today, I have a special offer for you. An offer that will make your life so much easier that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
Your competitors might already have one, but they probably […]

When I first wrote about professional reviews as a mentoring platform, some people responded with the question: what’s wrong with peer reviews anyway? Why do we need a person specializing in code and design reviews instead of assigning this task to peer developers within the development team?
As I explained in previous posts (and as you […]

Once upon a time, whenever people talked about quality they talked about process. They talked about documented, repeatable process. They talked about unified process. And they talked a lot about metrics. Quality management was a synonym for being obedient, and quality was all about discipline.
But something has changed. More and more people realize now that […]

I’ve received a lot of great feedbacks on my post It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It. I get the sense that many professionals “out there” are really fed up with the endless online (and offline) debates about “the best software development methodology”.
Reality proves over and over again that there isn’t such thing. The best thing you can […]