Quality

Here's one for you: Supposing I combine my preternatural programming skills with my well known talents as a practitioner of Voodoo Economics to come up with a software tool that can take chicken heads and source code trees as input and, as output, tells you exactly how much each line of code contributes to the company's bottom line.
Would you use it?

Apgar scoring cannot score the willingness to do what one knows is a bad job of work

When I read the article Daniel referred to in his Apgar score post, and I came away with a different lesson. My central observation was that simply by tracking the Apgar score, doctors and hospitals became more interested in reviving babies that they might previously have diagnosed as stillborn.

The doctor can start with observations of the patient that are more or less objective, although even in medical science, the observation of the patient factors out the patient's reaction. The problem in MIS development is that the starting point is not objective, consisting instead of texts which are a mixture of honesty and obfuscation, and the interests of a subset of the real stakeholders.

This morning I was reading the Oct 9, 2006 issue of The New Yorker magazine, which contains an interesting article called "The Score: How childbirth went industrial." The article is about the process of childbirth, and more specifically, the medical techniques and industry, for lack of a better word, that have developed around childbirth. When I started reading the article, I was not expecting to encounter an intriguing idea related to software development--but ideas often spring from unexpected sources.

I've also been witness to the birth of vast numbers of RUP artifacts into a corporate project atmosphere of total apathy. Sheaves of use-case diagrams, sequence diagrams, UML versions of the Last Supper--you name it; unread, unused, sent straight to dead-document heaven.

Why do lawyers retain expert witnesses? Why does a general practitioner refer you to a specialist? Do you see a pattern here?

What is it about daylight savings time? DST not only makes it hard to get up on that first, dark Monday morning (it was for me today, that's for sure), but it appears to be a bug-fest for software systems. I may be reading too much into things, but I observed what I believe to be Daylight Savings bugs in the software systems of two different vendors yesterday/today, and, while I don't have any statistical analysis to go with it, our support phones have been ringing off the hook all day.

I'm going to try to express an idea here that struck me this morning when I heard on NPR that Johann Sebastian Bach was born on this date in 1685...

This an open discussion thread for the developer.* article "The Art in Computer Programming," by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. If you haven't already, you can read it here, then add your comments below.

I cringe every time I read the words "computer glitch" as the alleged cause for everything from election screw-ups to health plan fiascos. The "computer glitch" scapegoat ranks right up there with the infamous line: "Mistakes were made." Disembodied responsibility.

So, since I was the last person to squawk about how bloody awful our release process was, I pulled the duty without meaning to and definitely without wanting to. Therefore: I, InstallShield Chump.

There are real challenges facing the software world related to long-life applications, both the ones we're stuck with (or, to put it another way, the ones that have been serving us well all these years) and the ones we've yet to build. Now that we know that decades-long application lifetimes are a reality, how are we as a profession addressing this need?

Sometimes a simple bug is an isolated occurrence. But making that assumption without further investigation, just fixing it and moving on, seldom leads to real, lasting system improvement.

You may be able to deal with this situation when buying a book online, but it's just unacceptable when you have 30+ paperwork packets per day to process. So even though you have your new web app, you're not using it, and the machine with the vulture on top is still humming away.