First, read this: Hazards And Safeguards for Software Rewrites. This is an infuriating article. The first part is nonsense. I wonder if it's intended to be read ironically? Maybe it's a list of bad ideas? Skip straight to the Safeguards for Rewrites section. It's really good.

Also, this Characterization Testing …

Required Reading: https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150304-agile My takeaway quote? "Scrum lags behind the modern toolchain enough that there can be a Potemkin village vibe to the whole thing." I was clued into this from another takeaway quote someone seconded on Twitter: "Waterfall used too much written communication, but …

I've seen some discussion on Stack Overflow that is best characterized by the question: "What is Strictly Agile?", or "What's the Official Agile Approach?".

Someone shared this with me recently: "Process kills developer passion".

I have also heard some great complaints about organizations that claim "Agile" and actually do nothing …

See the 10 Open Source Opportunities entry in CIO Minute.

The OS and Virtualization territory is already staked out. Not sure this will be a real opportunity space.

Enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, BI) are scary. Scary because these are purchased by CIO's. CIO's are herd animals and -- of course -- an …

The disruption from Microsoft's failures are only starting to be felt. Check out Frank Hayes' "The Pain Begins " column in the January 26th Computer World.

Corporate IT stubbed Vista. What will it do with Windows 7? And what's the fall-back plan if Windows 7 is bust and Microsoft does an …

Recently, I started on an architecture for which Fast CGI seemed like a good idea. But then, I couldn't find a pre-built YUM distro for Fedora Core 9 . Further, I couldn't really build my own, because I couldn't find the FC9 version of /usr/local/apache2.

Stuff moved. And no …

First, a standard software development life cycle . Simply multiply by your team's billable rate.

Here's another version .

Also, see Software Development illustration.

This lead me to Project Management . Also pretty-well universally true. Except -- of course -- the page has a bunch of odd bugs like a repeated joke and damaged HTML …

Here's some reference information on the "Cone of Uncertainty". JB says that Steve McConnell popularized it. There's an orphaned wikipedia article , a note on Construx.com's site, an article in the IEEE Digital Library, and an image on Microsoft's china site.

It's crap. Why do we use it? Because it …

Here's the analysis.

"60 cents of every IT dollar goes to maintaining existing systems". "This increased 'run the business' spending has consumed budget resources that were originally earmarked for more strategic and transformational investment," writes Gartner analyst Jed Rubin.

So, what happens with the "innovation" portion of the budget?

In …

Some reading:

1. Flexible Software is Error-Enabling Software , by Sean McGrath. If users can make changes, they can make mistakes. Why would you allow users to make changes? It's their process, it's their data. But, everyone in IT is absolutely sure that end users a lying gypsies. After all, if you …