Making IT work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Jul 7, 2008 in Development, Main, Management | 2 Comments
Sorry I haven’t posted much lately; I actually have a few posts in draft status, but I’m currently in Dallas, pouring over hundreds of pages of source code listings (Z8 assembler, anyone?) and haven’t had a chance to finish up any of them. In the meantime, here’s my latest Baseline column on the challenges of [...]
By bfwebster on Jun 9, 2008 in Development, Main, Software engineering | 1 Comment
In my earlier post on the “thermocline of truth“, I wrote: Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, as reflected in the common acronym SMOP: “simple matter of programming.” Even when an IT engineer doesn’t have a given subsystem completed, he tends to carry with him the notion that he whip everything into [...]
By bfwebster on May 14, 2008 in Development, Main, Management, Project Failure, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).] Humanity has been developing information technology for half a century. That experience has taught us this unpleasant truth: virtually every information technology project above a certain size or complexity is significantly late and over budget or fails altogether; those that don’t [...]
By bfwebster on Apr 29, 2008 in Development, Hiring, Main, Management | 3 Comments
[UPDATE: Here are some more observations from Ruby-coloured glasses.] Alex Papadimoulis over at The Daily WTF (one of my favorite IT blogs) has posted a lengthy and thoughtful solution to the problems I raised in my post on the “Dead Sea effect“. Specifically, he refers to the “Up or Out” model, pioneered over a century [...]
By bfwebster on Apr 26, 2008 in Books, Development, Hiring, Main, Management, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 2 Comments
[Note: I originally wrote about this concept in my first edition of The Art of 'Ware and was going to include it in version 2.0 of that book. However, my review of the most recent translations of the oldest manuscripts of Suntzu pingfa has led me to re-interpret the maxims for that section. As a [...]