In Rat-holes of Lost Time [Rat-Holes of Lost Time ], I thought out loud about software development and how the resulting software product may or may not be of any value. In SEI terminology [view_qm ], this is Need Satisfaction. Sometimes I call it Solving The Problem ™.

I tried to distinguish two …

A comment on Offshoring Shows How Valuable Code Is floored me: "Another answer [to the 'what do you value?' question] could be to show cost reduction for the quarter. Its the old short term thinking to make Wall Street happy."

First, I concluded that "cost reduction" is somehow separate from …

See Schrage in CIO magazine on March 15 http://www.cio.com/archive/031506/schrage.html?page=1.

When we outsource of offshore some coding, what are we saying is valuable?

We're saying that the net effect of the installed software has value. We're saying that no existing product does …

I've been using the Apache FOP http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ to transform XSL:FO into PDF's. FOP works well enough for some DocBook processing, but it can't handle really complex stuff gracefully.

Can we also use this XSL:FO technology for producing PDF form letters as part of a …

First, I've had some opinions on this "one language" ideal After PERL what?. We have a variety of languages for a good reason: the languages express different kinds of things. Shell command languages really have little to do with markup languages, database manipulation languages or "general-purpose" programming languages.

One of …

A number of testing frameworks were used. The Agile Testing tutorial provides a path through the toolsets, showing what you can do, and how you should do it.

Unit Testing: [Nose ], <{filename}/blog/2005/11/2005_11_09-compare_and_contrast_round_3_revised.rst>

Acceptance Testing: [FitNesse ]

Regression Testing: [TextTest ]

Functional Testing: [twill ]. A thorough analysis is …

Much of software development is best described as "problem-solving". Much of the rest, BTW, is knowledge capture.

When we look at the time spent on problem solving we can see four potential outcomes.

1. Time is spent producing a viable solution to the actual problem.
2. Time is spent producing a non-solution …

In it, Bruce Silver recollects process reengineering gurus who warned "Don't pave the cowpaths!". Presumably because the cow path was a random walk all over the pasture land, and wasn't the most efficient course.

However, anyone who was watched cows at work will tell you that the cow path is …

In my case, the opacity of Perl actually wasn't entirely my opinion. I was contacted by folks that were struggling with Perl. In one case, they specifically lifted up the opacity problem. "If my partner gets hit by the bus, I can't maintain these web sites."

In the other case …

Control Break Reporting is a design pattern that has been around since the earliest …