When people discuss software development, there is a certain tendency to overgeneralize. One should be careful to respect legitimate differences between some of the areas being compared.
The term “software engineering” has become fashionable in recent years, implying that software development is really just another specialty within the general area of engineering.
There is a general misapprehension that people are disinclined to say or believe things that are not true.
However, it seems that people are often motivated to say or believe things for a variety of different reasons, operating singly or in combination.
For the Sake of a Good Story
We all participate in the “willing suspension of disbelief” that is necessary in order to appreciate a story that is being told.
2.
What does it mean to be human?
Human nature seems to me to be characterized by the following primary traits.
When Darwin first suggested that humans shared a common ancestry with apes and other animals, many people were shocked by the notion. But Darwin’s principles of evolution are now considered to be scientific fact by the vast majority of responsible scientists in biology and related fields.
“Documentation.”
The mere mention of the word can cause visible shivers in many software developers.
While it is possible to talk about various types of documents and models in much more specific ways, and the relative value of each within specific methodologies, there is also considerable value in looking at this entire class of work products in general.
This may seem like a painfully obvious truism, but most software developers are binary thinkers. The bit is either on or off. My program compiled without errors or it didn’t.
Much has been written about Apple’s recent resurgence but, in many ways, the key to Apple’s success can be expressed in a single word: art.
Art is something we often think of as being sequestered away in a museum, separated from our daily lives, and certainly kept at a great distance from anything to do with business. Conventional wisdom has it that art cares nothing about money, and business cares all the world about it, so trying to mix them together will only ruin both.
Apple, however, has proven that nothing could be further from the truth.
Book by Mary Beth Chrissis, Mike Konrad and Sandy Shrum
Published in 2006
5 Stars
At times it seems that the software development world is equally divided between those who worship the CMMI and those who vilify it.
While the role of software in our society has grown tremendously over the past several decades, the industry has also been plagued by what is often called “the software crisis,” resulting in hugely expensive projects that are ultimately cancelled, or completed late and over budget, or that result in defective or simply mediocre products.
When companies attempt to implement [lean][] principles, some of their biggest stumbling blocks seem to be the cultural elements. While some of the [Toyota][] methods are very clear and specific, the cultural issues often seem more difficult to pin down. Many organizations seem to translate the most obvious elements into terms that they are comfortable with, but something often seems to get lost in the translation, and their lean implementations struggle because they have not really modified some of the basic ways in which they think about their work.
