Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially impossible to answer. And yet, the question persists.

There are three rules for figuring out which is …

I love hypothetical questions. Got a bunch recently. I guess it's the season for hypotheticals.

These all seem to come from the "Averted Glance" school of management. The best part about the "I don't want to know the details" management is that we need to substitute metrics for understanding. One …

In general, Software Engineering Metrics are not without value.

Expecting magic from metrics is what devalues them, reducing metrics to dumb numerosity.

Once code is in production, plenty of metrics are readily available. For example, the trouble-ticket history tells you everything you need to know about code that's in production …

They say "You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure". This isn't quite right, however. You can measure lots of things you can't manage. Rainfall, for example. Software development is like that. You can measure stuff that you can't actually control.

The original Deming quotes are more subtle: there are things …

Common Complaint: "This was the nth time that someone was up in arms that [X] was broken ... PL/SQL that ... has one function that is over 1,500 lines of [code]."

Not a good solution: "Find someway to measure "yucky code"."

Continuing down a path of relatively low value, the …

I find the value proposition for a Service Oriented Architecture to be agility and simplicity.

See Linthicum's Real World SOA blog postings, specifically "Core Value of an SOA... " Here's the interesting quote: "this does not mean that reuse is not a core value of SOA, but its value is much …

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 …

Here are three additional levels of numerology that just don't belong the discipline of software architecture.

Empiricism. Ideally these are from Physics and related "hard" sciences. Psychology or Economics are "hard" sciences in the other sense of hard -- they're difficult because of the subject matter. The magic number 7 ± 2 …