By bfwebster on Nov 10, 2012 in Architecture, Art of 'Ware, Complex systems, Development, Product development, Project Failure, Quality assurance, Risk management, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 2 Comments
[Cross posted from And Still I Persist] [Note: I am currently in transit from Colorado to Florida and am composing this post as I have time and 'net access.] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 18, 2012 in Complex systems, Main | 0 Comments
Via Slashdot come a link to this MIT video (sorry, can’t find a way to embed it) about the work that Rodney Baxter (founder of iRobot) is doing to develop a new kind of industrial robot: cheap (~$22K), safe, and programmable by factory workers. What rings true in Brooks’ commentary is that people will find [...]
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 Nov 23, 2011 in Complex systems, Main, Management, Product development, Quality assurance | 6 Comments
This is actually a problem I’ve been dealing with — or, more accurately, ignoring and working around — for a few months, at least, so I thought I’d put a post up here to see if anyone has come up with an actual fix. Back in July 2010, I bought an Acer Aspire easyStore Home [...]
By bfwebster on Apr 15, 2011 in Complex systems, Main, Maintenance, Product development | 1 Comment
I love it when technology converges. The first key step was buying a Windows Home Server box last summer. It took me a while to get all the kinks out (read my review at the link), but since then it was worked pretty much trouble-free, 24/7. Not only do my various computers get backed up [...]