Architecture
CS 428 – Winter 2019 – Webster #01 readings
In-class lecture on three of my blog posts on software engineering: The Real Software Crisis — an article published in BYTE (January, 1996) The Wetware Crisis: TEPES — A follow-up post written in 2008 The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect — How IT organizations can go bad
Displacing entrenched technology
Successful technology — and I’m using the term broadly here, not just limiting myself to digital tech — has a propensity to entrench itself and then become very hard to displace, at least directly. A classic example is the internal combustion automobile (which I’ll call the “gas auto” for shorthand). Commercial production started over 130 […]
CS 428 (Fall Semester, 9/11): Lecture on The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks), Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5
OK, it’s a bit embarrassing to realize it’s been nine months since I last posted here. But a new semester has started, and with it, my lectures on software engineering for CS 428 (at Brigham Young University). Here’s my lecture from the first class, covering chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 of The Mythical Man-Month […]
Link to post: how Nokia missed the smartphone boat
Again, via John Gruber at Daring Fireball, comes this story from a Norwegian journalist who wrote a letter of complaint to Nokia in 2008 about his new Nokia smartphone. An excerpt from his letter: Telephones – like all other devices – need to be designed on the terms of the simplest user. All of the […]
Remember Conway’s Law
Some years ago, I was called in to lead a team of three other people in reviewing a major project at a Fortune 50 corporation. This project, which I’ll call QUBE, was a major end-to-end re-engineering of that firm’s mission-critical systems, intended to replace all the existing legacy systems. The QUBE project was supposed to […]