The customer sent a screen grab from an accounting desktop application with a couple of rows highlighted. They claim that the application I reverse engineered from C and rewrote in Java didn't work for this one case.

Step 1. Get clarification on the screen grab information. The data labels don't …

First, read Bach's Heuristic Risk-Based Testing . Clear and simple.

Then, read Amland and Garborgsv Risk-Based Testing and Metrics . Not so clear -- probability gets folded in, confusing the issue. Also check out Schaefer's Risk-Based Testing . Probabilities are waved around like they're important. They aren't.

Risk management shouldn’t be confused with …

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 …

The article by Joe Wilcox in eWeek is actually really good -- except for the silly subtitle. See "No Enterprise Thaw for Vista ". It provides solid evidence that Vista is covered in FAIL. Not rumor or bias, but solid research on sales, adoption, conversion and the like.

The only flaw in …

An old professor of mine writes "There are lots of pathological propensities at work ..., "Gee, we've got a way to use the computer to ..." In short, automation for the sake of automation."

See jbox.dk Quotations on Simplicity . The fundamental principle is that simplicity is really important. But how do …

Here's what's great about Django coupled with the Django-REST Interface : It's almost all model. You define the model, write some tests. Add the URL mappings, write some tests using the built-in Django client.

We're almost there, but this doesn't work out perfectly. To do complete tests, we have to either …

Fundamentally, we need to provide explicit version identification on a schema. This is technically easy, but organizationally nearly impossible.

Technically, we need to use some kind of version control software for our model and the resulting DDL. We need some meta-meta-data to track schema names and version numbers. If we …

I've been asked about the proper location of Stored Procedures more than once. I've come down very strongly in opposition to triggers and stored procedures.

First, PL/SQL is slow . Anecdotally, people claim that introducing PL/SQL made an app faster. I submit that they restructured the application significantly to …

In the Small Not-for-Profit Web Presence posting, I identified a software portfolio for a small NFP. Basically, it was a list of cheap (or free) web resources that would provide a solid web presence with relatively low cost. More importantly, it would move them off a legacy web presence that …

Here's a great summary of Agile techniques. It's in ComputerWorld's Development section, in an article by Heather Havenstein: "Five Web 2.0 app dev lessons for enterprise IT ". I think the article is mis-titled, since it's basically "Agile for Big IT."

Some of the five techniques are motherhood and apple-pie …