For quite some time I was content to write programs without ever bothering to draw diagrams (UML or some other kind) before. I rarely resorted to math or formal algorithmic techniques, either. A lot of the industry talk on modeling strikes me in the same way as the religious talk on sin: intended to make people feel guilty so that they'll toe the...

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. --...

Failures provide a template in the mind of a project manager. If you've lived through a major failure, then when you hear certain phrases or see things that happened previously, you instantly become more alert and start asking more questions. -- Ken Orr, "When Dr Kevorkian makes a house call" (Cutter IT Journal 03/2004)

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. -- C.A.R. Hoare These new problems, and the future of the world depends on many of them, requires science to make a third great advance, an...

...so, in place of the large number of precepts of which logic is composed, I believed that I would have enough with the following four, provided that I were to make a firm and constant resolution not to fail, even a single time, to observe them. The first was never to accept anything as true that I did not evidently know to be such: that is to...

Why do Extreme Programming practitioners keep requirements on index cards? Because when you rip a card to shreds, or go through a whole pack when you thought you had a small project, that gives you information about what's going on in the project that's a lot more difficult to ignore than just adding or removing lines in a spreadsheet. Computers...

Why do Extreme Programming practitioners keep requirements on index cards? Because when you rip a card to shreds, or go through a whole pack when you thought you had a small project, that gives you information about what's going on in the project that's a lot more difficult to ignore than just adding or removing lines in a spreadsheet. Computers...

I don't know which pleases me more, that Frank is reading my mind or that Heath Row is reading my blog. (Vanity - is that a form of optimism ?) I'm not a regular Fast Company reader, but I know Heath Row by reputation, through being a member of the global network he somehow kickstarted, Company of Friends. Heath's relentless curiosity for new ways...

I don't know which pleases me more, that Frank is reading my mind or that Heath Row is reading my blog. (Vanity - is that a form of optimism ?) I'm not a regular Fast Company reader, but I know Heath Row by reputation, through being a member of the global network he somehow kickstarted, Company of Friends. Heath's relentless curiosity for new ways...

The Agile Manifesto states: "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." Yet the topic of self-organizing teams seems to barely deserve a mention at conferences or in articles (compare the number of references in the Agile Alliance's article index - the Project Management section vastly outweighs the...

The Agile Manifesto states: "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." Yet the topic of self-organizing teams seems to barely deserve a mention at conferences or in articles (compare the number of references in the Agile Alliance's article index - the Project Management section vastly outweighs the...

My postings on risk management have attracted some attention and feedback recently, yet I'm wondering if risk is entirely the appropriate focus of our "management". If by "manage" we mean something like "control the amount or supply of something", then risk is for the most part not something we can manage. What we can control is our attitude to...

My postings on risk management have attracted some attention and feedback recently, yet I'm wondering if risk is entirely the appropriate focus of our "management". If by "manage" we mean something like "control the amount or supply of something", then risk is for the most part not something we can manage. What we can control is our attitude to...

I've been following Colin Morley's blog, Empowerment Illustrated, for a while now. I have little love for mucking around with the tools of blogging - it's the writing practice that keeps me at it - but Colin's blog was the impetus for putting aside this distaste and equipping this page with a blogroll, so he could be on it. (There are others just...

I've been following Colin Morley's blog, Empowerment Illustrated, for a while now. I have little love for mucking around with the tools of blogging - it's the writing practice that keeps me at it - but Colin's blog was the impetus for putting aside this distaste and equipping this page with a blogroll, so he could be on it. (There are others just...