Webster & Associates LLC

The first column, “Second Class Software Quality for Major IT Projects”, talks about the curious fact that organizations are willing to spend millions, tens of millions, even hundred of millions of dollars on major IT project and yet still nickle-and-dime their software quality assurance (SQA) effort. It doesn’t help that SQA personnel are pretty much [...]

On September 2nd, I’ll be speaking at a meeting of the Denver IEEE Reliability Society. It will be held at 5:30 pm in the Seagate Building in Longmont (CO), on Nelson Road between 75th Rd and Airport Rd.
Here’s my abstract of the talk:
INSIDE-OUT: Organizations too often treat software reliability as an ‘after the fact’ consideration, [...]

Yes, it’s my latest Baseline column:

Last week, 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 [...]

My latest Baseline column talks about the risks that follow a successful IT project:

But sometimes with projects that really shouldn’t succeed—that are attempting too much, too fast, with too many risks—enough things go right, particularly along the critical paths, enough superhuman effort is made by those involved, so that the project does indeed go into [...]

My latest Baseline column is up, talking about the challenges of a geographically-distributed software development project. Take a look.  ..bruce..

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)]
Categories: managerial
Various industry studies cite the productivity gap between the best and the worst developers. While there is some controversy over the ranges often cited (such as the famous 26:1 figure), anyone who has managed a diverse group of developers won’t argue [...]

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)]
Categories: managerial
That which gets measured gets accomplished or, at least, evaluated. That’s why various software metrics are used as an indication of progress and accomplishment. The best known and easiest to compute is lines of code (LOC), usually measured as thousands of [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

Here’s an interesting story over at Physorg.com about the IT project supporting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing:
Atos Origin is the information technology partner for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with the job of designing, building and operating the invisible IT infrastructure that supplies results, events and athlete information to the media, spectators and the world.
It [...]