Here's a great post called "Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells". This lists some "Management Smells": specifically doing clumsy, ineffective things and calling it "Scrum".

I found this in StackOverflow question, titled "Any stories where trying to apply Scrum went wrong?"

Another great answer was a link to "Scrummerfall: World's …

Here's an interesting -- and common -- question.

"... any tools that I could use to create a web scraper that I could use to interact with a .aspx website?

I want to build a tool that will read an input file (e.g. an excel spreadsheet) containing a list of property parcel …

In Creating Complexity Where None Existed, I noted that it's possible to create complexity out of thin air.

Indeed, by wallowing in the supposed drama, one can turn the differences between sales and service delivery into a hopelessly complex situation. A focus on a manufactured "conflict" leads to the following …

I read a 482-word treatise that amounted to these four words "sales and delivery disagree".

A more useful summary is "Sales and Delivery have different views of the order".

It started out calling the standard sales-delivery differences a "Conflict" requiring "Resolution". The description was so hopelessly enmeshed in the conflict …

http://xkcd.com/730/

I almost wet myself. This is so typical.

First, let me say that TDD rocks.

Few things are as much fun as (1) writing a test script for a feature, and then (2) debugging the feature incrementally until it passes the test. It's fun because a great deal of hand-wringing and over-thinking is taken off the table.

To …

Consider this dialog box.

• The application was modified.
• It can't be updated.

Why not just replace it? Replacing a modified application seems to be a perfectly sensible use case.

But no, rather than doing something useful, it shows a dialog box. I guess no one thought through this use case …

My MacBook has an 80Gb drive with less than 2Gb available. A few times I've totally filled the disk and had to spend time judiciously searching and removing old files. Sigh.

I have (and use) external hard drives, but it seems to violate some kind of "laptop" principle to be …

About once a week a question shows up on Stack Overflow that involves loading a database with truly epic volumes of data. For example "billions of rows in a single table for a month".

Billions of rows per month is a minimum insert rate of 385 row per second.

Also …

Great article on "Search" from back in '08 in Forbes. "Why Google Isn't Enough", by Dan Woods. He's talking about "Enterprise Search": why in-house Google-style search is really hard and often unsatisfying.

Here's the cool quote.

enterprise search systems also index and navigate information that may reside in databases, content …