February 15th, 2007
The annual checkup with my doctor is always unpleasant, because (a) he makes me get on the scale right away, and (b) he offers no “silver-bullet” quick-n-easy solutions for the inevitable bad news:
“You’ve gained ten pounds this past year, Mr. Yourdon.”
“What?!?” I exclaim, with just the right amount of shock and righteous indignation. “How could […]
February 15th, 2007
Michael Mah sent me an email message about his presentation at the New York SPIN meeting, with a comment that I thought was so important that I snipped it out of the email and posted it here:
“One thing i hope i conveyed - that you can be *agile about getting measures* that yield meaningful insights. […]
February 15th, 2007
I’ve gotten various comments in response to the software productivity/quality metrics that I cited from Michael Mah’s presentation to the New York SPIN chapter the other night — ranging from “Of course! It just proves what I knew all along” to “Baloney! I don’t believe a word of it!” All of this reinforces one of […]
February 13th, 2007
Don’t shoot the messenger, okay? I didn’t generate these sobering statistics myself, and while there’s an underlying rationale that makes sense to me, I haven’t had a chance to personally validate them. If you want more details, you should contact Michael Mah himself; I’ll provide more details on who he is, and where he got […]
November 19th, 2006
A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog article entitled “Why Hasn’t Software Development Gotten Any Better?” Hank Heath and Moshe Gotesman posted some thoughtful comments on the blog, which I encourage you to read; and I’ve also gotten some interesting offline comments sent via email. For example, a long-time colleague, Becky Winant, wrote to […]
November 9th, 2006
I participated in a software “best practices” conference today in Jersey City, and listened to several speakers lament the mediocre state of software development today, with ad hoc development processes, lack of metrics, and various other poor practices leading to schedule slippages, budget overruns, and poor quality. Someone in the audience interrupted one of the […]
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 […]
