Development
Buying vs. building software applications: the eternal dilemma
Some years back, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he was working at the time. The corporation had a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The corporate employees who used this application largely used it and nothing else all day long at dedicated workstations. The application […]
Pushing for the right IT project solution
In my last post, I talked about some of the reasons why large organizations often reject the best solutions for a troubled IT project: fear, pride, budget, and the ever-present internal politics. This week, as promised, I will talk about what it takes to champion the right solution. I can’t guarantee that you’ll succeed, but […]
Fooled by success: the dangers of delivering projects on time
One of my favorite books is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicolas Taleb. Taleb’s thesis, which he explains and defends well, is that we often attribute to talent and insight great results that were actually more a matter of luck—a fortunate random outcome that might well have turned out otherwise. Taleb’s examples are largely taken from […]
Distributed Development (Part II)
In Part I, I talked about all the challenges that surface when you attempt distributed software development, that is, having an IT project team being spread out over a wide geographical area. Simply put, it’s tough to do well, if at all, for a variety of reasons, including problems with communications among developers, maintaining conceptual […]
Distributed Development (Part I)
The idea of an IT project team spread out over a wide geographical area is an old one. It became practical in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with the advent of hard disk drives — instead of punched cards, paper tape or magnetic tape — for source-code file storage, wide-area networking (including the Internet), […]