Category: Books

Pitfall: Lying to yourself and others »

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)]
Categories: managerial
Self delusion and group delusion are all too common in software development projects. Several factors combine to bring this about. One is the natural optimism prevalent among software engineers, particularly when they are not allowed, encouraged, or required to spend sufficient [...]

Pitfall: Misjudging relative costs »

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)]
Categories: managerial
This is a classic pitfall in software engineering. Typically, insufficient time is allocated for the problem specification, research, design, architecture, and review that should occur before coding and during each development cycle. Likewise, software quality assurance (SQA) is often given little [...]

New column for Ziff Davis: “Surviving Complexity” »

I’ve been working for some time on a book called Surviving Complexity. Many of my posts over at brucefwebster.com have adapted from materials I’m writing for that book.
Well, now I’ve been hired by Ziff Davis Enterprises to write a weekly column on IT Management for the online version of Baseline. That column is [...]

Pitfall: Allowing new features to creep (or pour) in »

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)]
Categories: managerial
The impulse to constantly add new and incremental features to a software program certainly isn’t unique to modern software develoment, or to a particular technology or methodology. It derives largely from three sources. Upper management and marketing want, and sometimes need, those [...]

Pitfall: Allowing the specification to drift or change without agreement »

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)]
Categories: managerial
Let’s start by freely acknowledging that, with rare exceptions, software of any complexity changes between original specification and actual delivery. This is to be expected, and to a certain extent encouraged, when the changes represent a refinement of our understanding of the problem domain [...]