Faerie Dust™

Here's how to recognize a Faerie Dust request:

1. We have identified a problem. It can be with almost anything: scalability, reliability, auditability, any Quality Measure .

2. We're pursuing a specific technology. Typically, something that has the lowest impact on our architecture.

3. We can't address anything other than this …

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Office is Bloated, Let's Add More

"There has been a lot of skepticism about the usefulness--and necessity--of the Ribbon, and I have to admit that I was among the doubters. Why change something that works? Because, according to Microsoft, the current interface has become bloated with too many menus."

Ugh. It's bloated, so we'll add features …

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Notable Failure of Use Cases - Part 4

I recently reviewed some end user-authored use cases, and they -- of course -- reflect the way people actually work. The computer system was largely incidental to what they did.

Each use case listed half a dozen actors, had a dozen or more steps, and involved many off-line interactions among the actors …

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Rat-holes of Lost Time

Much of software development is best described as "problem-solving". Much of the rest, BTW, is knowledge capture.

When we look at the time spent on problem solving we can see four potential outcomes.

  1. Time is spent producing a viable solution to the actual problem.
  2. Time is spent producing a non-solution …
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Don't Pave the Cowpaths

In it, Bruce Silver recollects process reengineering gurus who warned "Don't pave the cowpaths!". Presumably because the cow path was a random walk all over the pasture land, and wasn't the most efficient course.

However, anyone who was watched cows at work will tell you that the cow path is …

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Stating the Problem

In principle, stating a problem is a trivial exercise: someone can't do something. It can be made wonderfully complex, however. The root cause of the complexity could be a fundamental unwillingness to state the problem without including technology hints like "database" or "hierarchy" or "project management" or "change control".

Context …

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