May 29th, 2007
I had the great honor and pleasure of participating in a retrospective panel session on peopleware last week at the International Conference on Software Engineering (aka ICSE 2007) in Minneapolis, with some of the luminaries in the software field: Fred Brooks, Barry Boehm, Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, and Linda Rising. The panel — celebrating the [...]
May 20th, 2007
If you look at the top of my newly-redesigned blog, you’ll notice several “tabs” that you can click — each of which will take you to a separate page on the blog. One is the standard “home” page, and another is an “about” page that tells you what a wonderful person I am. But I [...]
May 19th, 2007
I’ve uploaded some 2,000+ photos, organized into 42 separate albums, onto Flickr. Some of them are as recent as a week or two ago; and some of them date back as far as 1969. You can see a thumbnail layout of the photo albums here on Flickr.
May 19th, 2007
If you’ve been visiting here often, you may have noticed that it looks somewhat different. My friends from DataLAB have helped with me with a major overhaul of the “look and feel” of the blog, and our plan is to make it a lot easier to track down some of the content and resources that [...]
May 10th, 2007
I’m giving a presentation in Toronto today at a Software Best Practices conference sponsored by the IT Metrics Institute. The presentation is about the “Ten Most Important Ideas in Software Engineering,” and (as usual) it’s organized in the form of a mind-map. You can download the PDF version of the presentation, with hyperlinks embedded, by [...]
May 6th, 2007
One of the things that makes New York City interesting is that large-scale spectacles sometimes occur without any warning or public announcement. It can be a parade of elephants marching down the street, early in the morning, on their way to the Ringling Brothers circus. Or long convoys of shrouded trucks, rolling down the highway [...]
May 5th, 2007
I was out of town most of last week, and when I returned, I had two copies of David Weinberger‘s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, waiting for me, courtesy of Amazon. I must have been so excited by the prospect of getting it that I ordered it twice, on separate occasions; in any case, I [...]
May 4th, 2007
Capers Jones has just published a new edition of his vintage-1998 book, Estimating Software Costs (2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, 2007). It’s not light reading: 664 pages full of tables and charts, lists of techniques and strategies for estimating cost, schedule, defects, and maintenance effort for different kinds of software projects. In addition to, or possibly instead [...]
May 3rd, 2007
Monday afternoon’s session at the Cutter Summit was devoted to Web 2.0, with Stowe Boyd providing the keynote address. I’ve known Stowe for several years, and subscribe to his blog, so I was interested to hear what he would have to say about Web 2.0 — and in particular, the impact of “social tools” on [...]
May 1st, 2007
If I had to boil Rob Austin‘s keynote presentation on “Learning from Innovators Around the World” down to a single sentence, it would be this: while IT has had a long (and generally successful) track record at improving profitability by cutting costs, and while it has often found some innovative ways to cut costs (e.g., [...]
