Category: Pitfalls

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 [...]

The Sessions paper — an analytical critique »

[cross-posted from brucefwebster.com] Roger Sessions has published a white paper, “The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity” (PDF). It’s created a bit of a stir in tech circles, largely because Sessions estimates that “worldwide, we are already losing over USD 500 billion per month on IT failure, and the problem is getting worse” (page 1; [...]

Pitfalls of distributed development »

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

Pitfall: Using the wrong developers »

[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 with [...]

Pitfall: Using the wrong metrics (or none at all) »

[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 lines [...]