See Martin Fowler's essay on Technical Debt . Also see Steve McConnell's thoughts <http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx.

We can use Agile techniques to get things done ASAP and ACAP (As Soon As Possible and As Cheap As Possible). However, we still need to …

Someone sent this question to their manager and included me on the CC: list.

"Would you consider tools like Django to quickly build web apps ?"

My suggestion is that a bald query like this can only get on of two possible answers: "No" (and a large number of unsubtle variations …

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 …

I read recently a quick note on a Very productive day . New development feels more productive than maintenance because it's more "linear"; it sounds like that means fewer dead-ends, less exploration.

I also read recently "How to innovate on time " where the trick is to increase your failure rate. In …

My approach to preventing IT insignificance begins with firing the good programmers, since they're saddled with low-value work to begin with. In order to see what that means, let's look at the three phases of an IT organization's collapse to irrelevance. Then we'll see why some specific reorganization steps can …