To begin with, we're talking about the implementation's source code. Here's the situation: Ann says that Bob's code is no good, and she's provided an alternative implementation. How do we choose?

The first part of any scorecard is the SEI Quality Measures Taxonomy . It's marked "Legacy", but I haven't seen …

This is an important topic. I've blogged on the layers issue before ("Layers, Interfaces and Mutabilty "), and this AJAX issue is a great additional point.

With depressing regularity I also hear the complementary "stored procedure" question. This question takes a number of different forms, but they all mean the same …

See The hubris of calendrical calculations. And Calendrical Calculations, Part 2.

"Here are the exact words from the client when I suggested using the "official calendar": I’m aware of other systems having tables for Holidays but I don’t know that we can piggy back off any of them …

The customer -- usually someone from IT -- has met with the users, and determined what their problem is and what is required to solve it. This is the standard procedure, but it rarely works out well. Here are some scenarios and some coping strategies. After some hand-wringing about scope and budget …

When we're Holding the Hammer, everything's a nail. There are a number of supporting arguments for this. I won't beat down the All Those Features™ decision-making pattern again. That, and some part of Tomorrow's Dollars Don't Exist™ decision-making pattern are in "Is it Over-Solving or Exploiting Technology? "

From Improving-NAO : "I …

Here's a snip from a comment:

"... over-solving the problem is writing a bunch of custom code (the file readers and writers) when there is already a perfectly good mechanism available for all of the persistence, reliability, repeatability and scalability issues. To me, if my application has already been designed to …

R. Lucente shared an email with me that included Cary Millsap's Volume Theorem.

Theorem:

No human wants to see more than 10 rows. Ever.

Which caused me to wonder why anyone would ever use an RDBMS as a slow, complex, high-overhead message queue. I've seen it done several times, and …

"There has been a lot of skepticism about the usefulness--and necessity--of the Ribbon, and I have to admit that I was among the doubters. Why change something that works? Because, according to Microsoft, the current interface has become bloated with too many menus."

Ugh. It's bloated, so we'll add features …

This is the part that helped me understand this: "It was kind of like a miracle drug," [Ruth Samuelson] said. "It's going to do all this stuff and I just didn't think it was possible."

It appears to me, just reading this account, that there wasn't a clearly articulated problem …

Nisley says "Imagine a programming contractor proposing that increasing the average interrupt latency by 10 μs would reduce the module size by 5 percent and improve the error rate by 3 percent. When was the last time you saw precise numeric relations between various aspects of a programming project, before …