deadlines

The Duct-Tape Programmer Explained

October 2, 2009

Hope you had the time to read through all the essays linked to in yesterday’s post about the reactions to Joel Spolsky’s article “The Duct-Tape Programmer”. Here is my take on it. The use of the words “Duct-Tape” was only chosen by Joel as a flame bait, as he admits on his Twitter feed. Joel has a […]

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All About the Duct-Tape Programmer

October 1, 2009

The programming blogosphere exploded to Joel Spolsky’s controversial article “The Duct Tape Programmer” which, as Joel said on Twitter, was meant to provoke people: Of course, nobody would read that or link to it. So I have to embellish. “Duct tape” instead of “simple, well-understood tools.” I was planning to write on it, but couldn’t […]

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Avoiding Software Car Wrecks

September 15, 2009

I.M. Wright’s post on risk management is worth reading: Software engineers do this all the time. They come up with a development schedule, unexpected issues come up, and they end up being late. Instead of informing their managers of the delay, they avoid facing conflict, rush the work, sacrifice quality, and slip the schedule, all […]

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Serialize Your Projects

September 13, 2009

Stephan Schmidt explains how doing several projects in parallel is counter-productive because of the high overhead costs involved. Projects must be tracked much longer, more documents are produced and must be tracked. All those status messages aggregate, flow upwards toward upper management, clog thinking and time. All those status messages flow to all stakeholders. Each […]

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Quality and Deadlines

July 7, 2009

In my previous post on software quality, I said that it was wrong to argue that quality lowers cost without talking about transition costs. There is also another dimension that we must consider, which is the calendar time taken for deliverables. In the long run, higher quality results in more deliverables or less development time […]

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