Years ago there was a very popular television program called "Bonanza". It was about a father and his four sons living on a ranch in the Lake Tahoe, Nevada area in the 1860's. It ran on NBC from September 12, 1959 to January 16, 1973; in other words 14 years, and thus it was the second longest-running western (just after "Gunsmoke"). Everyone I knew watched it and knew all about the characters and plots.

But no one asked a very simple question: Why is this show called "Bonanza"?

I like tools. I'm old enough to remember what it was like to develop software with a simple text editor (VI, anyone? Emacs? How about See? I'll bet nobody remembers See.exe…) Then you'd compile it at the command line, manually run the linker, etc… and I appreciate how much our tools have improved over time. I love intellisense, source trees, version control, context highlighting, the wonderful way resharper allows you to fix problems en-situ, and all that.

But I also know that the more powerful your tools are, the more you can become dependent on them and, worse, the easier it is to misuse them.

In the business of software development, things change rapidly. Computers get faster, development platforms, languages, and paradigms shift year to year, even month to month at times. The shelf life of the average technical book can be measured with an egg-timer (anybody want a copy of the VB4 bible?).

One of the things I like about Lean is that it offers a metaphor that everyone involved (even executives and customers) can understand. The metaphor is that the development system is like a pipeline. Ideas go in and value comes out. Yes, it's much more complex than this but this simple metaphor will suffice for the points I want to make. I illustrate this pipeline in Figure 1.

There is a division in the agile community about whether one should rely on people or focus on people supported by systemic thinking (no one I know of suggests systems alone are enough). This debate is often the people over process Vs. people and process (or as Don Reinertsen would say people times process). I've been in the agile community for some time and have seen some interesting things that I think shed some light on this debate. This long-time perspective has enabled me to see an interesting pattern.  read more »

I was recently surprised when someone said I had said software is not creative.  I was surprised because I can’t imagine myself ever saying that.  On reflection, I realized I had said software is not like art.  But I meant that it is not like art because art does not have a particular customer nor does it need to follow particular rules.  Art speaks to whoever it speaks to.  It comes from the artist and its message will hit various people differently.  Software has to satisfy the needs of the customer.  In other words, great artists write from their heart and soul and they provide  read more »

I recently had to install a driver for a network printer in my home. This is, I would say, a pretty commonplace thing to do in modern life.

I don't want to suggest that what happened was limited to a particular vendor, so we'll leave the company name out… however, it is one of the most prominent and successful printer companies in the world. Not some little podunk knock-off, in other words.

I put the CD that accompanied the printer into my drive and ran the SetUp program. Given that this is a device intended for home use, one would assume (as I did) that I would simply answer a few questions that the rest would be handled for me by the installer.

I'd installed this driver before, on other computers in my house. I knew it was large (much larger than I would think it would need to be) and that the installation took upwards of 20 minutes to complete, and that the "progress bar" would often just seem to be making no actual progress sometimes, but so long as the task manager said it was "running", I'd just have to be patient. So, I left it alone.

I came back a few hours later, and it was frozen at 24%. Task manger reported that it was still running (no "not responding" message or anything like that), so I left it. Two hours later, still nothing, so I finally cancelled the process and tried to determine the cause.

Recently at the Rails conference, Bob Martin served up a very provocative talk: "What killed Smalltalk could also kill Ruby." There has been a fair amount of controversy about this particular presentation, most notably from the Smalltalk community who consider themselves to be not-at-all-dead. They point out, for instance, that Smalltalk was not free "back in the day" and Ruby/Rails is, and that this makes more of a difference than many of the factors Bob was referring to.

For my part, I don't care all that much whether one language or another is in vogue as much as I care how the technology is being used and specifically how our profession is or is not maturing as a result. Bob said that we were not a profession in the past but are now. I tend to agree with him. He also equated the notion of a profession with the concept of disciplines which I also totally agree with (this should not be too terribly surprising to anyone familiar with the book I wrote recently - Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development - and if you note the particular engineering practices we choose to teach at Net Objectives).

So I'm with him on this, but I think there were a couple of things missing in his equation.

I have heard it said many times that patterns have to be discovered. Years ago, after reading Christopher Alexander's "Timeless Way of Building" I felt that this wasn't really true - since patterns are not really just "solutions to recurring problems in a context" but rather an exposition of the forces present in the context including the relationships between these forces.

Last year I was diagnosed with a "nodule" on the right side of my thyroid (this is the word they use when you have a tumor and they don't want to freak you out). My doctor told me that the nature of the thing (soft, large) meant that it was unlikely to be cancerous, but that we might want to remove it anyway because it might turn cancerous later.

I asked "would I have to stay overnight in the hospital, or could this be done on an outpatient basis?"

He nodded and said "well, it's superficial, so…"

I interrupted. "Ah, good, so it's no big deal."

He looked puzzled. "Um, no. What?"

"You said it was superficial, so that means it's no big deal, it's trivial."

"No," he said, "it is not trivial, it is superficial."