"Is Good Code Possible?" John Blanco asks on his blog. He goes on to tell a harrowing story on how he had to develop an iPhone app for a big retailer (“Gorilla Mart”) in less than two weeks. Why he even accepted the contract is beyond me but then, he may not have had a [...]

In the latest installment of my podcast, I asserted that “all software productivity problems are project management problems”. In this post, I will explain why I believe that to be the case and how I think those problems can be resolved.

Bits of Evidence View more presentations from Greg Wilson.

For software development, there are a few things we need on a daily basis: our source code, our documentation, our integrated development environment (IDE) and our hardware. Without any one of these, a software developer is as useless as… well… something very useless.

Business is largely about management which, in turn, is largely about reducing costs and reducing time-to-market. However, today’s management models for human resources are largely based on two things: physical presence in the office and seniority. Performance is often only part of the equation when it comes to promotion – people tend to get promoted [...]

As I said in a previous post, the new economic realities that come with peak oil and climate change will change the way we work and the way the computing industry is run. One of those changes will be limiting unnecessary costs related to moving people around – something we already do for goods.

I’ve drawn up a list of my intellectual property yesterday. It’s about four pages long and contains libraries, applications, web apps, training material, etc. Only one thing that I’ve ever created and published is in the public domain – the rest has copyrights attached to it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t use it, [...]

“Autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward are the three qualities that work as to have if it is to be satisfying. It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five – it’s whether our work fulfills us. (…) Work that fulfills those three criteria is [...]

Yesterday, I was asked what I saw as the most important factors to ensure the development of quality software. What I cited was good design, good implementation following good standards, and good testing. On the testing end, I have a rule-of-thumb that says that at least 85% of the code should be covered with unit [...]

I just finished reading a report by the Software Engineering Institute that accomplishes something that earlier literature, including “SCRUM Meets CMMi – Agility and discipline combined” didn’t accomplish: it takes a rational step back from both methods, shows where they’re from and why they’re different, how much of that difference is real and where the [...]