By bfwebster on Nov 8, 2012 in Art of 'Ware, Articles, Development, Main, Management, Professionalism, Software engineering | 0 Comments
Thanks to Cat Mikkelsen [yes, ex-NeXT people, that Cat], I read this article. It’s written by Linds Redding, an art director and animator down in New Zealand who just passed away a few days ago. But it is very, very relevant to software engineering, particularly the ‘heroic’ model of software development. In it, he talks [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 12, 2012 in Articles, Complex systems, Development, Main, Product development, Professionalism, Risk management | 2 Comments
A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its [...]
By bfwebster on Mar 4, 2009 in Articles, Baseline, Development, Main, Maintenance, Management, Risk management | 0 Comments
My newest Baseline column is up, and in it, I talk about technology lifecycles that can cause you grief: Each technology is on its own product lifecycle, which may or may not match with your organization’s business and development lifecycles. In particular, there are certain cycle mismatch patterns that commonly occur in organizations looking to [...]
By bfwebster on Jan 20, 2009 in Articles, Baseline, Main, Management | 1 Comment
I’m currently writing a series of columns for Baseline on how to deal with frozen or reduced IT budgets due to the current economic troubles. Here are the first two columns: Performing IT Project Triage Pulling the Plug on IT Project Next up: how to deal with personnel issues. ..bruce..
By bfwebster on Nov 20, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Education, Management, Product development, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
My latest Baseline column is up, and it talks about why you should read these five books now, if you haven’t already. And if you have read them, you should probably re-read them. ..bruce..