November 2007

Software Estimation and the Business-Technical Conflict

November 21, 2007

People often talk about the 5 day workweek, but in reality, such a division of time and work is only applicable to hourly-paid workers. Financial people divide time into quarters of the year. Marketing folks divide time into advertising campaigns and trade show events. The technical crowd divides everything into projects. The IT support crew […]

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A Theory of Simplicity

November 17, 2007

Simplicity is one of those goals that everyone talks about, but few achieve. When designing applications, simplicity is supposedly a paramount concern, yet many applications never achieve that state. Very often, we see simple applications that are very basic in terms of functionality. Or, we have highly functional applications that are very complex for end users. […]

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The Commercial Market and Copyright

November 4, 2007

In response to a recent article by Jeff Atwood about BitTorrent, Charles Petzold wrote an amusing post on how a failure of the commercial market could be used to justify illegal behavior. The debate was interesting because it brought out many aspects of the copyright situation. Petzold is a content producer and is rightfully worried […]

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The Higher Google Stock Price

November 3, 2007

Even if you don’t own Google stock, you still benefit when Google’s stock price keeps climbing upwards: Ad-free services: If it were any other company, services like Orkut and Analytics, among many others, would be chock-full of advertisements. Google could be making more direct money from services like Blogger, but at this moment, that does […]

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Complex Requirements

November 1, 2007

Of the many differences that separate a simple software project and a complex one, this one is the most critical: A complex project has requirements that do not fit into one human brain. Many people understand this concept vaguely, but never understand it deeply or consciously. So let us analyze what this means. A complex project […]

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