Software Integrity

Two of our recent blogs; The Misnomer of Best Practices and The Dreyfus Model are tied together nicely in this episode of Enerjy.tv by way of a conversation I had with Dan North of Thoughtworks. Dan regularly speaks and blogs about these topics and g

Achieving Project success over the last 30 years has been difficult! Reports on various studies released over the last 5 years state as little as 30% of complex projects succeed. Although this number is climbing, very large projects (300 – 500 man ye

A large part of improving the quality of software is knowledge sharing (indeed it is one of the basic tenets of Lean). In most organizations when a bug is submitted it is usually delegated to the developer who wrote the original code.  Paul Pagel’s

One evening after sessions at the Better Software Conference, Dan North and I got into a discussion regarding the phrase ‘Best Practices’ and concluded that this term was actually a misnomer. Let’s take a non-software analogy; wearing a seat belt in

So I was coming back from Atlanta yesterday and, as I arrived a bit early at the gate, settled in to read my RSS feeds. I picked a spot that was far enough away from the gate not to be too crowded, while at the same time allowing me to keep an eye o

The Dreyfus Model shows the 5 stages of skill acquisition possible through experience of a subject. Created by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in 1980 while researching AI, the model was popularized by Dr Patricia Benner in the mid Eighties in her work on

Residents living in a city-owned apartment complex in Nottingham, England, were locked out of their homes on Tuesday of this week after a new security system was installed. Property manager Nottingham City Homes was installing security upgrades, inc

Verizon blamed a software glitch this week for the fact that it published approximately 12,500 unlisted phone numbers in a Washington County, MD phone directory. The company stated that it is taking steps to make amends to affected customers, anywhe

After reading several blogs and comments on the demise of Java, I felt compelled to post some interesting facts. Only a small percentage of developers go to conferences like JavaOne. These people constitute the majority of those who read, write and

After much thought, we have decided that selling Java development tools is not a viable business model for us. Several recent events have helped us reach this conclusion: At JavaOne this year, free tools completely dominated the sessions. The exhibi