Raccoon describes the basics of learning curves — they go down and start at the top, so you actually want them to be as steep as possible to get back to parity and start process improvement. He points out that all people learn.
Making Software Correct By Design?
Jesse Poore, the University of Tennessee professor, is interviewed by ACM’s Ubiquity for his recent article in IEEE Computer, “A Tale of Three Disciplines… And a Revolution”. Poore talks about how if we made correct specifications, our software would work. While I agree that software should not fail as often as it does, I think that he misses the point …
“Factors Affecting Professional Competence of IT Professionals”
Blanton et al. did a small study in one metropolitan area of IT professionals, measuring variables that the earlier literature on professional obsolescence and how they interact with these IT pros keeping up (professional development to avoid obsolescence).
Why Developers Don’t Do The Necessary Professional Development (Hint: It’s partly management)
They set out to understand why, if professional development is so important to their own careers and corporate performance, don’t more developers do it. They studied quite a few from several organizations and discovered, well, what I expected:
Stability: America’s Enemy
J sent this link to me today. The author argues that in pursuing stability as a diplomatic goal, America has turned its back on its anti-imperialist values, propping up reprobate regimes of rascals for American businessmen when it should have been supporting the anti-imperialist freedom fighters. There’s more than a little righteous indignation at our doing so, and I always …
What Prices Would Look Like If We Had Tied Booze Taxes to the CPI
For example, beer was originally taxed in 1951 at US$9.00/barrel and was taxed at US$18.00/barrel in 1999 (federal taxes only). If the US Congress had written an inflation-adjusted tax, it should have been US$55.88/barrel in 1999.
How Berners-Lee Finally Built Hypertext By Taking It Back 30 Years
There were lots of more interesting and much more robust systems that provided better access to knowledge. But they didn’t have Berners-Lee and his peculiar mix of vision and practicality. That mix was uncommon, and for innovators to be successful with bringing technology to change the world, they have to believe that they work for a greater good.
Measuring Software Project Size
I’ve mentioned articles by Phillip Armour of Corvus International (Deer Park, IL) before: he writes a regular feature in Communications of the ACM called “The Business of Software” and normally features some of the tougher, management-oriented problems of development. This month he tackles how software is measured and points out the ridiculous use of “Lines of Code” or LOC. (Of …
Using Middleware to Not Replace Systems
There have been a spat of IT articles in HBR in the past couple of years, showing that IT has finally made it from the weirdo to the standard practice status. “Getting IT Right” seems to follow from “The REAL New Economy” and “IT Doesn’t Matter”. Charlie S. Feld and Donna B. Stoddard make an argument for “three interdependent, interrelated, …
“database quality has improved little in 11 years…”
For the past eleven years, Blaha and his associates have been reverse engineering software for evaluating products. He came up with some terrifying results.