Kenny YoungBuck approaches the Master and asks, "What is good design?"

The Master replies, "Kenny, you innocent little monkey, it's a wonder you haven't joined a cult. Good design maximizes business value while minimizing costs including development, maintenance, adaptation and operation."

"Master, are there circumstances where this is not true …

Sometimes a column is not the atomic piece of data you thought it was. See Essay 10.1 for the first part of this rant, which address multi-dimensionality.

A second example of a column not being an atomic piece of data is when we have to support navigation through a …

Software development evolves through four phases:

1. Identification of a problem and inception of a project to implement a solution.
2. Elaboration (analysis) of that problem to determine the most effective solution.
3. Design of software to implement that solution.
4. Implementation of the solution; installing and configuring software, training, and everything that goes …

There are two layers of use case authoring and minimal consensus on which level is "right" for any particular purpose.

1. Business Level use cases - ignore the presence or absence of a GUI, and pursue the business problem. This leaves designers free to create any GUI, perhaps one that is not …

We know something is wrong or can be improved, but we lack the will to drill into details and write a problem statement. It isn't a lack of ability, it is purely a lack of will.

A common source of serious issues with software comes from proposing a solution without …

We're told, repeatedly, to avoid changing horses in mid-stream. We're told not to follow the crowd blindly.

Once upon a time, we made a technology decision that -- at the time -- was right. But things have shifted around a bit, and what was once prudence is now folly. When do you …

The challenge in starting a project correctly is to get a problem statement written down in spite of the lack of clue. There is a pervasive unwillingness to tackle problem description because it is so hard. It's hard because there is a potentially lengthy search to separate proximate from root …

See Holub's column "Requirements Gathering" [Requirements Gathering ] for the goods on what is actually useful and what isn't so useful in this activity we call "Requirements Gathering".

I have to applaud the notion that "focus on the minutiae" misses the whole point. A clear problem statement is perhaps more important …

This is what I remind myself to do on a daily basis. It forces me to be problem-focused, not technology focused. It also enforces the design principle of "deferred decision-making".

• Isolate design decisions (via proper allocation of responsibility) so that the final, final decision can be made as late in …

This year's Turing award for human-like Chat Bot announced on the BBC. [article ]

Boing Boing has already noted the Wired article pokerbots on bot's in on-line poker rooms.

I tried posing as a bot in an experiment and failed miserably. I hesitated too long on dumb postings and responded right …