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 […]

I have a confession: I am not the kind of person who wanders around the house looking for things to fix. Let me rephrase that: I am not the kind of person who fixes things around the house as soon as something breaks. OK, you’re on to me — I hate fixing things around the […]

When I was a child, one of my favorite TV shows was The Time Tunnel. The concept of being able to go back in time and try to fix the things that went wrong fascinated me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone from the future could come back and fix whatever it is we did wrong?
Maybe […]

“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 […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Hijacking Of The Word Agile. In that post I’ve mentioned Jim Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.
And today, a new comment was added to this post by… Jim Coplien. Due to the illusive nature of the Web I can’t know the author’s identity for […]

Before you read this post let me assure you that Agile Development is great. It includes some common sense ideas and good practices which can help many projects succeed.
Now that we got this out of our way, let’s start.
The word “Agile” was first hijacked to describe a set of software development processes, methodologies, practices […]

Imagine five bright people sitting around one table, speaking what seems to be the same language, using common words, which could be found in any dictionary, and correct grammar. And yet no one really understands the others.
No this is not one of those riddles that make your head hurt when you try to solve it. I believe […]

Software Quality Assurance people love measuring things. Test coverage, schedule slip, hours slip, velocity, number of reviews, the existence of reviews, number of defects, the average time it took to resolve a defect, function points, cyclomatic complexity, and of course the famous KLOC. If you got all excited reading these last couple of lines, you must […]

Data visualization is not a new concept. Anyone who ever prepared a business presentation knows that a colorful diagram expressing the data visually has a much greater impact on the audience.
But data visualization is more than merely a presentation technique. With data visualization you can easily gain new insights, which enable you to take action. Coming up with the same […]