I was doing a question-and-answer one time at a university’s ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) club. This was a bunch of 18-22-year-old computer science majors. There were a couple of interesting technical questions but the overriding theme was about employment and careers. The main question was basically, “How do I get a job?” My answer […]
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 […]
A recent discussion has come up in my organization. Three years ago we embarked on a “grand experiment”. We re-org’d into 2-pizza service/agile teams, committed to Scrum and DevOps and Agile, trained and hired, and sally forth! For some teams, this was a natural fit and it worked great. There were a couple of in-house […]
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 […]
Why doesn’t the classic PMP process work with software? The official Program Management Body of Knowledge provides a well-defined process workflow for the initiation and execution of projects. At a very high level, the workflow is something like this: Define Scope -> Create WBS (deliverables list) -> Create Activity List -> Estimate Activity Durations -> […]
I distinctly remember a few years ago reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I recall that at about halfway through there’s a discussion on Quality. Specifically, the speaker asserts that Quality itself is not truly definable, and Quality is the breakpoint between rationality and…whatever the opposite of rationality is. One interesting thought experiment […]
