121–130 of 201 posts
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If web based project: Involve your operations team as early as possible. Carry on.
Deployment plans & team should be part of initial technical planning. They are the linchpin to ensuring happy customers. No?
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" I find it no surprise that the larger companies have made foundational maths, such as category theory and abstract algebra, the underlying abstraction for their general frameworks. " I would like to learn more; do you have a specific example? Having worked with real "engineer" engineers, I've found that they have, and value, a considerable amount of mathematical education, but that education is all in continuous ma…
I considered editing my other comment but decided instead to break it out. There are a couple of complexities that your comment illustrates well: First, continuous math _is_ available and immediately applicable today. The problem is that we often reason in and program to the implementation, not the abstraction - a subtle difference, but an important one. Not only that, but by reasoning in a flawed representation, we…
It's fun to watch observations like the following re-discovered again and again. From the NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968: Ross: The most deadly thing in software is the concept, which almost universally seems to be followed, that you are going to specify what you are going to do, and then do it. And that is where most of our troubles come from. Fraser: One of the problems that is central to the software…
Imagine you are a large company and there are 10 ideas for things you can build next, and you can't do them all. You gather the people that build such things and ask them, "how much will it cost to make each of these, and how long will it take". Do you think it is an acceptable answer if the builders reply, "I have no idea how much it will cost, I don't know how long it will take, and I don't know what you will have…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you are a large company and there are 10 ideas for things you can build next, and you can't do them all. You gather the people that build such things and ask them, "how much will it cost to make each of these, and how long will it take". Do you think it is an acceptable answer if the builders reply, "I have no idea how much it will cost, I don't know how long it will take, and I don't know what you will have…
> Do you think it is an acceptable answer if the builders reply, "I have no idea how much it will cost, I don't know how long it will take, and I don't know what you will have at the end of the process." If that's the actual answer, then anything else is just obfuscating the truth. Why should we encourage lying to try to cover for the fundamental lack of knowledge? If you don't know, trying to make up numbers never m…
A surprising number of people in business think this way: not that they need to make sure of something, but just that they need someone to tell them everything will be OK, and then put the blame on if anyone is unhappy. That someone will naturally be whoever is at the bottom of the totem pole.
This would rather much be like a carpentry shop owner lamenting "why don't either electric circular saws OR handsaws work to make my mediocre workforce produce beautiful furniture without all of this wasted wood?" First of all, creating beautiful furniture takes LOTS of time, as it rests in attention to detail and an uncompromising position towards quality. When you're uncompromising about quality, you require yourse…
Because, in the end, no one actually knows how to write software.
Knowing how to make something doesn't mean that you know how to make it instantly without any costs, however - or on whatever other arbitrary schedule management sets out of ignorance
Because it tries to fix human problems logically. Humans are not very logically creatures. We love to think we are, but most of us are very emotionally driven. Our emotion comes into play when it comes to drive, motivation, hard work, creativity, and organization. Creating software requires motivation, creativity, organization, etc. Our emotion is behind software and we simply try to manage it with software developme…
The point of these methodologies is to help replace unhealthy development behaviors with healthier ones and to use groups that offer reinforcement of the healthy behavior as part of the process.
Of course, much like diets, not everyone is really going to "buy in" to the new "healthy" habits. They will drag their heels, whine, and generally continue their unhealthy behavior.
The advice often comes (including in one of the XP books) that the answer to "bad projects/people/environments that you can't change" is to get a new job; this may work at the individual level (sometimes), but it does nothing to actually fix the broken projects, environments, or people themselves.
There is indeed no silver bullet. All these decades later, and many people still refuse to accept that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you are a large company and there are 10 ideas for things you can build next, and you can't do them all. You gather the people that build such things and ask them, "how much will it cost to make each of these, and how long will it take". Do you think it is an acceptable answer if the builders reply, "I have no idea how much it will cost, I don't know how long it will take, and I don't know what you will have…
I can't give you an exact cost and time, but what I can do is give you relative cost and time. "This is easy, this is easy but will take a while (low variance), this is hard (relatively long time, high variance.) -- so that's giving you your estimate and your tolerances. Further, I can work with you to figure out what portion of each project will give you the biggest bang for your buck. So you can say, "I want to spe…
this one of the many examples of the anti-intellectualism that is so pervasive in the software development scene. Are the inflexible, detail-prescripting methodologies he describes any good? of course not, but I haven't seen a single seriously used methodology be like that in real life unless it fell on the hands of negligent/incompetent management and/or engineers.