So if you’ve ever worked with me, or you’ve read enough of this blog, you’ve no doubt seen that I base many of my ideas on quotes and memes. Well, here’s a new one that I’ve started using a lot lately. “Given enough constraints, the solution space goes to zero.” What does this mean? Let’s […]
Last week I talked about the importance of domain knowledge. I asserted that if you are building, supporting, or selling something, that it was important to understand the domain that you were working in. Otherwise, you would face challenges. But that’s the ideal use case. What about the pragmatic reality of the situation, where this […]
For quite a while, I was excited about the new videogame Cyberpunk 2077 being released. It looked to be quite an amazing game. When it was released, although it had many great aspects the game also had a lot of bugs and defects. One bug, in particular, made the rounds on social media, as video capture. It […]
I heard about a concept this week that I like, which is the phrase, “Dealing With Ambiguity”. Now, this is a pretty straightforward phrase, but the context in which I heard was very interesting. It was the idea of this being a very specific skill that can be practiced and trained. In the area of […]
Do you know what I love about software developers? They’ll just code to what the requirements or user stories are. I have a little joke to myself, that with the dramatic industry shift to everything-as-code (i.e. infrastructure-as-code, software-defined networking, etc), that pretty much all jobs will eventually one day be “software developer”. Take network design […]
Anyone here ever hear of the Iron Triangle? The idea is that, for any project, there are multiple high-level objectives competing with one another: cost, speed, and quality. And that to improve on any one you have to sacrifice the other. Let’s put this another, simpler way. You want a car that has more features, […]
As I’ve talked about before (and everyone already kind of knows), good requirements are a key driver to success. To put it simply, you need to know what problem you are trying to solve for your customer, what your end user really wants, and what they are expecting you to build. It’s all about Expectation […]
or, The Art of Writing Requirements. When you are writing software for an end user, if you strip away all the fluff and bells and whistles, you are doing something very simple: You are solving a problem for someone. The heart of this issue is a simple concept: when you are writing software, what are […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 