See Spolsky's Talks at Yale, Part 1 of 3 for a fairly typical summary of formal methods in software development. Here's the part RL liked: "Now, if the spec does define everything about how the program is going to behave, then, lo and behold, it contains all the information necessary …

TP sent me this great link on MVC and related patterns. It's Ctrl-Shift-B's posting, Interactive Application Architecture Patterns . It is helpful at disentangling the distinctions between various kinds of model-view-controller, and model-view-presenter alternatives.

This is important because the terminology gets borrowed and adulterated sometimes. When we look at Struts , we …

See Present Perfect for some thoughts on unit testing. See some other commentary on the discipline required to write Python programs in Gnome devs too lazy for python . I think I see the disconnect that makes testing appear to be too costly; I think that some basic "meta-quality attributes" are …

Here's part of a recent email, subject "Antique Programmer in search of face lift and/or brain transplant as appropriate...". It was from a VP/Director kind of person who'd been away from hands-on technology for a few years.

"I’ve got a new Vista PC with dual drives so …

Since I spend a lot of time on skill upgrades for my clients, my books are oriented around that theme. It's something that I learned from Jim Bullock : there's a Clue Absorption Rate, and you can't exceed that rate. These books are about building skills incrementally.

I've got three Python-related …

One issue in creating a database design is working around the limitations inherent in the SQL data model. I'm going to call it the SQL model because you can make the case that the entity-relationship (ER) model is an abstraction and could have a far more expressive implementation. I'm going …

I can't find all of the Better Software Magazine articles on the Sticky Minds web site, so I can't provide a permalink. But look for "A Story About User Stories and Test Driven Development". It's good stuff, weighing out the good and bad features of "by-the-book" TDD.

Dr. Dobb's Journal …

In Lenses That Distort Our Software , I noted that the relational model of data can distort our view of the underlying reality that software models. In that posting I was whining about how meaningful structure is sacrificed to force fit information into the rows and columns of the relational world …

I see organizations stymied by a few individuals that seem to subvert initiatives and prevent progress. Or they somehow evade being useful and spend all their time in hand-wringing and "yeah-but"-ing. I'm not sure how to exploit what they can do, while getting past the stalls and evasions.

Here's …

Back in the olden days (ca. 1981) Barry Boehm's Software Engineering Economics provided a detailed and definitive guide to estimating. It did one really important thing: it provided a conceptual model of software development that had a (relatively) focused set of degrees of freedom, an input driver and a couple …