Its very common for software developers to be asked to build some software that is a straight port of an old software package, or to faithfully model (i.e. completely identical to) an existing process that the customer has. This is a huge mistake – try to avoid these projects. I hold that if the customer [...]
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The science of the architect depends upon many disciplines and various apprenticeships which are carried out in other arts. His work consists in craftsmanship and technology. Craftsmanship is continued and familiar practice, which is carried out in the hands in such material as is necessary for the purpose of a design. Technology sets forth and [...]
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Bob Lewis has a great column this month, “What if SOA is a mistake“? His penultimate paragraph asks:
Lost in the shuffle is something basic: Programmer productivity. Friends who are hands-on with such matters tell me the available SOA development environments are less than half as productive as products like PowerBuilder and Delphi were, back when [...]
Every now and again we get some customers who expect that they can get a custom website, portal, or services integration done by looking at a vendor’s “out of the box” experience. This can be very frustrating for us, as we need to get into their heads that no platform will delivery any website, portal, [...]
Saturday, September 5, 2009
I kind of disagree with this picture by Josh Susser regarding the “circle of death” in terms of code quality and late night effort. It is right enough as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough.
First up, the easy way out – take a day off, go for a walk in the [...]
I know that’s a pretty bold statement but here’s why. This morning I went to a vendor’s presentation morning, it was the usual game of buzzword bingo from the very first slide on. All the usual enterprise2.0, social-networking, portal-compliant, content-management, vertically-integrated, SOA-BPM-UCM-JEE-ESB-WS-BPEL platform-framework-enabling scalability-enhancing fun-lovin’ don’t write code but manage-the-enterprise-blog-wiki-twitter-facebook-youtube shopping cart drag-n-drop non-content that [...]
I just want to answer the anonymous “process nazis” trackback on yesterday’s ‘//TODO’ Considered Harmful post, because that blog desn’t allow comments without a login. Quite apart from issues with Godwin’s Law (and that the writer has enumerated a bunch of rules that get “violated” then accuses other people of being process nazis), the post [...]
Yesterday I said that developers should start being a little more militant about the craftsmanship of their code, i.e. pushing back on broken methodology that demands poorly-built code be released into the wild. This sort of code is always inherently fragile and will break your software if it has not already.
Today I just want to [...]
I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the JAOO conference in Brisbane, and I have a couple of things which I want to say I thought interesting. (‘JAOO’ btw, because I see people asking about it on Twitter, is pronounced a bit like “yow” but with the “j” from German/Dutch like “jah”).
Firstly, I found the [...]
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Also tagged agile, jaoo, methodology, scrum, test first, tools, xp
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Once, the CEO told the software team I was in working on in regards to a proposed feature … “Basically the feature’s ROI has to beat the cash rate. If I can get a better return by leaving this million dollars on deposit at the bank then I owe it to my shareholders to do [...]