Surviving Complexity
CS 428 Lecture: Surviving Complexity (01/09/2017)
Here is the video of the ‘Surviving Complexity’ lecture I gave as part of the CS 428 (“Software Engineering”) class I’m teaching at Brigham Young University. Here are the slides for the lecture, which include links to the posts cited.
Teaching CS 428 (Software Engineering) at BYU
This (Winter 2017) semester, I am teaching Computer Science 428 — “Software Engineering” — for the Brigham Young University Computer Science department. I am actually taking over this class from Dr. Charles “Chuck” Knutson, who was one of my students 30 years ago when I previously taught for BYU. I’m going to do a bit […]
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 […]
Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (Part I)
When Capers Jones published Assessment and Control of Software Risks (Yourdon Press, 1994), he identified the most serious software risk in IT projects as “Inaccurate Metrics,” and the second most serious software risk as “Inadequate Measurement”. I remember being startled when I first read that back in 1995—they certainly weren’t what I would have chosen—and […]
Weighing in on Project Orca
[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 […]