Joel Spolksy, of Joel On Software fame, published an interesting Inc Magazine article yesterday. The artcile, titled “How Hard Could It Be?: Five Easy Ways to Fail”, covers a number of issues that we developers see from our side of a software project.

As I was reading this, I started remembering how intimidating Joel’s words can be:

You’ll never hear anyone say “the team was just not smart enough or talented enough to pull this off.” Why hurt their feelings? The simple fact is that if the people on a given project team aren’t very good at what they do, they’re going to come into work every day and yet–behold!–the software won’t get created.

I’m certainly NOT a Master (hence this blog), but just because you don’t have unicode decyphering, PDP-7 microprocessor-based C running through your veins does not Read more »

It truly is amazing the tools we can get our hands on these days. The two that I have a very bad addiction forcannot code without are CodeRush and SQL Prompt.

The only trouble is Read more »

I’m late to the Agile party, I know… but I cannot help but keep seeing many failures and shortcomings of the past being accepted, welcomed, and then addressed in the Agile space.

How many times have you busted your head open trying to estimate a requirement of something completely unknown? How about spending that extra time (late night/weekend) building in some “cushion” on a function that you could imagine being requested in the next month? How many times have you seen the same good estimate track perfectly until it meets the reality of dependencies inside the product or is the next episode of “The Customer Tweak of the Week”?!

Well, wake up, you’re in waterfall land and hardly anyone actually works by that discipline. tomorrow/#more-19" class="more-link">Read more »