Category: Software

Recently I’ve been reading Steve Blank’s articles on startups. One of the principles that Steve espouses is that a startup is an organization formed for the purpose of finding a profitable business model. He points out that most business plans are not successful, and the successful startup is ready to quickly iterate, adapt the plan…

What I describe here is an augmented form of point based estimation designed to improve the precision of pointing, allow for faster and more effective resource transition onto the team, and improve the accuracy of the estimate.

A few years ago, I got a Mac. It started when I read about Apple jettisoning their entire operating system core and starting over with the UNIX-based NeXT operating system. Every day after work, I stopped by CompUSA and just explored all the OS X systems there. This all happened in late 2002 and, at…

My development experience has primarily been in commercial software. As such, I am quick to recognize that some aspects of agile methodologies aren’t always practical for commercial software development, nor were they designed with commercial developers in mind. For example, sitting with the customer you have not yet won is not really practical (or even…

I first came across the phrase “Cargo Cult” in the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman. In the book, Feynman warned researchers against fooling themselves and thus becoming cargo cult researchers. The term is from a 1974 commencement address given by Feynman where he talks about learning not to fool yourself, because…