Also see "On Risk and Estimating and Agile Methods". This post is yet another angle on a common theme.

A recent question

"what we might expect, in terms of 1) Time to completion, 2) Cost to implement according to the mockup, 3) Monthly server/maintenance costs and 4) approximate team size required"

This question was followed by this acknowledgement:

"it is hard to make the above estimations, given the …

After talking about some experience with legacy modernization (or migration), I received information from Blue Phoenix about their approach to modernization.

Before talking about modernization, it's important to think about the following issue from two points of view.

Modernization can amount to nothing more than Paving the Cowpaths.

From a …

Tweet:

People criticize for making tons of small classes instead of fewer larger classes.How is well-organized code more difficult to understand?

—jim christopher (@beefarino) May 31, 2013

This isn't really a question. Writing a few "large" omnibus classes is simply bad design.

There are several variations on the theme …

Careful study of the HamCalc shows a number of quirks. Some are funny, some are just examples of the need for unit test frameworks. The Wikispaces for the modernization project is here: http://hamcalc.wikispaces.com/home

For example, the following line of code, in GW-Basic, will (usually) set Y …

Once in a great while, you see someone engaging in Obstinate Idiocy.

Here's my recent example.

They're solving some kind of differential equation. Not sure why.

Symptom 1 of Obstinate Idiocy is No Rational Justification. The explanation is often "that's not relevant, what's relevant is this other thing I want …

It's impossible to step into the same river twice; other waters are flowing toward the sea. It's impossible to do "head-to-head" project comparisons. You can't have the same people doing the same thing with only one constraint changed. You can try to resort to having similar people doing the exact …

Check out this picture.

http://www.petapixel.com/2011/12/27/what-5mb-of-storage-looked-like-in-1956/