All software has bugs. I don't care if you're Apple, Microsoft, IBM, or a smaller, leaner ISV. Your software has bugs in it. Once you accept this fact, that into each software product a little crap must fall, it becomes clear that what differentiates one software development organization from anothe...

Like President Barack Obama said, it’s about getting up and dusting ourselves off. He also mentioned risk taking, and doers, and creativity. In software publishing, as much as anywhere, the web continues to change the business landscape. Retail markets go down in a double-whammy of technolog...

I’m giving a keynote address at the New Jersey Software Process Symposium on October 14th … somewhere in the wilderness of New Jersey. (All I know is that I’ve checked in at the New Brunswick Hyatt Regency hotel on the evening of the 13th, in the midst of pitch-black darkness all a...

Eskander Matta This man says, “No.” So what? He may look a little nerdy but he is a Senior Vice President at Wells Fargo Bank and using agile development techniques, he has dramatically reduced the time to develop new products for Wells Fargo’s online business.   What’s ...

I’ve had a running debate with my colleague John McCaffrey on the question of testing. He is a big fan of unit testing and testing in general that examines the smallest possible units to be tested, then assembles them in every larger integration tests. The idea is that if you get the small stu...

Jay Fields, who has been posting a very nice sequence of nuts-and-bolts Ruby and Rails guidelines, pauses to talk about creating examples. It's a topic I've wanted to write about here for a while, and this is as good a lead-in as any. Plus, I'm generally interested in how principles of software deve...

In many development processes, team members are organized by functional group. A project might have a team of developers building the code, and then down the hall or across the globe, a separate team of designers working on the visual and usability aspects of the application. The two sub-teams are w...

One of the things that comes up quite frequently when talking about Agile development with newcomers to the topic, is the subject of documentation. They hear about "just enough" documentation, "low ceremony" process, and Wikis. To many it seems like "not enough" documen...