Bullets are made from lead
After several years in the commercial world I returned to the ivory tower to help mentor students in software engineering at RMIT. These students were bright, intelligent and enthusiastic. Also, they were leading the way in a novel approach to teaching the art. One major thing stood out from their work - Agile was the future and waterfall was the past (and an almost dirty concept). They tried so hard to be fair to the waterfall model and tried to understand that it had some use, but I was left with the feeling that they really pitied anyone who used it at all, presumed that it would only be considered under duress and really felt that it had no place anywhere.
Let me be clear here this is not a rant against Agile nor a defence of waterfall, my issue is that as a profession we are selling a story of this replaces that because only new is best rather than a story of use this or that depending on what works best. The former is an easy story to sell, but the later is far more powerful in the long run.
Fredrick Brooks claims that there is still no silver bullet. I hope to shift our mindset from looking for one silver bullet that solves all our software problems to a less exciting but more practical position of we have many tools some better suited to some tasks than others and we need to enable our engineers to choose from a menu. If all our bullets are made from lead (Lead is a base metal - a cheap utilitarian material - that gets the job done) then we can select better for the task at hand. Read More...
Let me be clear here this is not a rant against Agile nor a defence of waterfall, my issue is that as a profession we are selling a story of this replaces that because only new is best rather than a story of use this or that depending on what works best. The former is an easy story to sell, but the later is far more powerful in the long run.
Fredrick Brooks claims that there is still no silver bullet. I hope to shift our mindset from looking for one silver bullet that solves all our software problems to a less exciting but more practical position of we have many tools some better suited to some tasks than others and we need to enable our engineers to choose from a menu. If all our bullets are made from lead (Lead is a base metal - a cheap utilitarian material - that gets the job done) then we can select better for the task at hand. Read More...
Head in the Clouds
03/06/13 09:38 Filed in: Systems Administation | Management
If you open any computing trade journal you could be forgiven for believing we had all moved to New Zealand and were looking out on a marvellous vista - the land of the long white cloud. Unfortunately, in spite of the great work being done by the marketing people, the world hasn’t actually changed that much. Cloud is still virtualised servers and remote hosting. The new and exciting bits are rapid on demand deployment and tear down. In this article I take a look at who and why you should use cloud from an economic management point of view.
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Fear of Command Lines
24/05/13 11:41 Filed in: Systems Administation | Management
Anyone know if there is a psychological term for fear of command lines and configuration files? A name for this phobia would be incredibly useful as I keep bumping in to circumstances where supposedly technical users downgrade a tool just because it doesn’t have a GUI and assume it must be “hard to use” if it is not driven by a point and click interface. Read More...
The Management Equivalent of Infinite Postponment
21/05/13 11:31 Filed in: Management
In scheduling there is a concept called infinite postponement (more correctly indefinite postponement) where a job that is ready to be executed is starved of resources because other jobs keep coming along that are a little bit more fit to be run according to the scheduling algorithm.
This behaviour occurs in management as well. Read More...
This behaviour occurs in management as well. Read More...
Don't forget your keys
14/05/13 09:17 Filed in: Management | Programming
Data cleansing is the process of taking the data contained in a data base and correcting the errors in it. It is probably one of the most hated jobs in the industry as it tends to be both tedious and exacting. The final two nails in its coffin is that it is almost never finished and almost never completely correct. All in all a miserable and mostly unsatisfying experience.
One of the secrets to success in data cleansing is in selecting keys i.e. the fields that allow the identification of the record to be updated. Read More...
One of the secrets to success in data cleansing is in selecting keys i.e. the fields that allow the identification of the record to be updated. Read More...