January 11th, 2008
I’ve written various blog postings on the subject of “Good enough” (see, for example, this recent post about the “good enough” nature of Twitter, and this somewhat older one of a more general nature), but it occurred to me that I should acknowledge the opposite end of the spectrum: bad enough.
When a software product […]
December 27th, 2007
After a series of annoying and unexpected outages on the Twitter network last week, my fellow blogger/Twitterer Michael Krigsman fired off an angry Twitter message (aka “tweet”) that said something along the lines of, “Twitter is not good enough for the Enterprise!” (Note the emphasis on “Enterprise” here, as opposed to “enterprise”; I’ll discuss that […]
November 7th, 2007
I’m participating in a “Software Best Practices” seminar in Albany tomorrow (click here for details on future venues of this seminar, hosted by IT Metrics & Productivity Institute — including Ft. Lauderdale and Austin next week), and I’ll be giving a talk on the “Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas.”
To download the 20.5-megabyte PDF of the […]
October 11th, 2007
I’ll be giving a presentation on the “top 10 software engineering concepts” at a software best-practices seminar in Detroit today; for more details about this and future seminars (including, for example, Jacksonville next week, and Austin next month), click here.
If you’d like to download a 15.9-megabyte PDF of the one-page mind-map for the presentation, […]
April 14th, 2007
I’m going to be giving a presentation on Web 2.0 in a few days for the Boston SPIN chapter (click here for details), so I thought it would be a good idea to update and revise my evolving mind-map on the topic. As usual, I’ve made it available for downloading, but it now comes […]
November 29th, 2006
I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one on the planet being driven crazy by what I call the “hand-held dilemma”: trying to decide whether to fill my pockets with five different devices that perform various functions very nicely, or consolidate them into one “übergadget” that does everything in a tolerable, but nevertheless sub-optimal fashion. […]
September 12th, 2006
I gave a presentation on death-march projects (see “Death march projects are back“) this afternoon at the Software Best Practices conference here in Albany, and it provided the opportunity to hear several other presentations during the course of the day — including Tony Salvaggio, Robert Lawhorn, and Joe Hessmiller of Computer Aid, Inc., and Herb […]
September 9th, 2006
If you’re over 30, you’re probably not even aware that there was a major uproar over a new feature introduced into the Facebook.com social networking service, which allows your “connected friends” to be instantly notified of changes in your personal status — e.g., the fact that you’ve just gotten involved in a new relationship, or […]
August 15th, 2006
A year or two ago, a combination of curiosity and vanity prompted me to set up a Google Alert search that pings me every time the name “Yourdon” pops up on the Internet. I’ve been intrigued to see how many distant Yourdon relatives are getting written up in local newspapers in Kansas, North Carolina, upstate […]
June 2nd, 2006
Roughly 10 years ago, I wrote a chapter on “good enough software” in a book titled Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. The message in that chapter was that American software companies were thriving because they had figured out that they didn’t need to strive for “perfect” software. We all want zero-defect software in […]
