OK, just last week I wrote a post on a report out of UCSD regarding difficulties in erasing data from solid-state disks (SSDs). But now out of Australia comes a somewhat contradictory report that some SSDs actually erase ‘slack’ (unused) space themselves without any user or system intervention — and, furthermore, that they can do […]
Freeman Dyson and James Gleick are both authors always worth reading. In this case, Dyson has reviewed Gleick’s newest book in an essay titled “How We Know”. An excerpt: According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and […]
E-discovery — the recovery, analysis, and production of evidence stored in digital form on various media — has become a major issue in litigation because of how much data simple devices can hold and the resulting duplication and multiplication of documents, files, and other digital types of evidence. Because of the risks and costs of […]
If it’s Friday, it must be another Baseline column. This one talks about the issues surrounding whether to build or buy software: The other day, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he’s working. The corporation has a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The set of […]
[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 […]
Classic patterns in disputed IT project: Hertz v. Accenture
Just ran across this article at the always-irreverent-but-usually-spot-on Register, an IT news site out of England. The standard patterns of a troubled IT project are so evident in this one report that I may well use it as a case study for my CS 428 (“Real-world software engineering”) class this fall. Here are some of […]
Neverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget
A story a few days ago caught my eye, not because it was unusual, but because it follows so familiar a pattern. Here are a few excerpts from the article: MANATEE — Late nights, hefty contracts and humming computers are a norm in the district’s School Support Center, where employees are working to fix a […]
Minnesota DMV software project: Faulty Towers/Neverending Story patterns
In my 2000 white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: System Failure (1976-2000)” [PDF], which I researched and wrote while at PricewaterhouseCoopers, I describe six broad fact patterns to classify the types of software system implementation failure. One of those patterns I named “Faulty Towers”: The client buys the system from [or has the system developed […]
![The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]](http://bfwa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/intel-cpu-150x150.jpg "The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]")
Back in 2000, PricewaterhouseCooper published my research white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF). This paper reflected research I and my staff had done over several months on roughly 120 two- or three-party lawsuits involving information technology. I found that almost all of these lawsuits fell into one or two of six […]