tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173104042024-03-12T16:15:23.480-07:00Software and BeerSteve Mitchell's blogStevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.comBlogger382125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-32263691783642528582010-11-23T14:31:00.000-08:002010-11-23T14:32:00.545-08:00This blog has movedThe new site is http://softwareandbeer.comStevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-9264334439506894772010-09-13T14:19:00.001-07:002010-09-13T14:19:39.059-07:00This Blog Has MovedThe new location is: http://softwareandbeer.comStevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-27969950025482002752009-09-03T10:05:00.000-07:002009-09-03T10:10:14.879-07:00Business of Software 2009 (speaking of culture)..speaking of culture..Check out Business of Software 2009 promotional video. Money quote:The business people have no hope of learning the technology. It's just too much. The hill is too steep to climb. That means for a software company to be successful, the people at the top I believe have to be software people, they really have to be the technologists. But they also have to have business Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-81685086516311384102009-09-02T10:43:00.000-07:002009-09-03T07:37:55.325-07:00The problem lies less in the competency and more in the culture..(Hat tip to Sean Rees for the pointer to this episode of "good intentions gone bad in the world of design")This is stunning. Take a look at this blog post. This guy takes it upon himself to complain to American Airlines about their horrendous web site. And makes a pretty good case that their CEO should be ashamed, and they should fire their designers.Dear American AirlinesBut then a (seeminglyStevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-39178798367590480352009-08-06T16:24:00.000-07:002009-08-06T17:06:23.766-07:00Disruptive change and other linksHarvard Business Review has a collection of articles by or with Clayton Christensen on disruptive change. You might know him from The Innovator's Dilemma. These articles span 1995 to the present, and cover the (mostly technological) impact of disruptive change and continue through the organizational and business response needed to deal with them. The set is well worth the $17. The book is Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-58951348884741861452009-07-31T09:00:00.000-07:002009-07-31T09:01:29.079-07:00Computer Programming as Stochastic ArtApparently the ancient philosophers used the word art to mean a body of knowledge about a subject that enables the artist to achieve a particular result. Art was broadly applicable to most any organized practice that people might undertake—what today we rather call vocations or professions.But the ancient philosophers had a nagging problem. While they could easily criticize a shoemaker for Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-51981535785109338402009-07-15T11:23:00.000-07:002009-07-15T11:33:10.916-07:00How Integrated Are Your Customer Experiences?When I worked in banking I learned a lot about the tricks banks use to coordinate the sale of their products to customers across the bank's various contact points with said customer. The part I worked on was to address the ability of the bank to integrate IT systems to promote products to you via a variety of outlets: printed inserts, prompts to tellers, ATM, the bank's web site, etc. The holy Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-48111887337751117652009-07-09T12:09:00.000-07:002009-07-09T13:10:00.082-07:00Chrome OS, the user experience, storage, and software pricesThis week started with a bang when Google announced they would create an OS-like version of Chrome designed to displace the traditional OS and initially targeted at netbooks. Given the coverage in the press, the world seems to have a short memory. You couldn't swing a dead cat back in the mid 1990's without hitting a similar strategy--specifically from Sun. Granted, the implementation is Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-80453338273497316042009-07-01T12:20:00.000-07:002009-07-01T13:15:08.445-07:00Transformations and teamSeth Godin's Learning from Singer is a nice, in-your-face reminder to reinvent yourself or die. The IT space is littered with the bodies of companies that couldn't do it (like DEC), and some surprisingly that could, like IBM. I'm particularly fond of the IBM example, as I think it's one of the miraculous cultural transformation stories in IT.Speaking of transformation, two examples of how our (Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-56074793032917481692009-03-16T06:54:00.000-07:002009-03-16T07:02:49.987-07:00The Green-field is always GreenerMaintaining software is harder than writing it. That's why groups often decide that a complete rewrite is going to be better than rearchitecting or even just maintaining their existing system. Management loves green-field projects because they're a mythical utopia that will provide an opportunity to get everything they want this time.Ref The Old "Migrate the App" Silliness via But at what cost?Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-51801694204003959392009-02-18T08:20:00.001-08:002009-02-18T08:46:04.297-08:00The Endowment EffectI recently met with some local software business leaders to discuss how the economy is affecting us. Driving to the meeting, I tried to think up a course of action that makes sense during these times. Best I could come up with were:Focus - Remove distractions and concentrate on the narrowest scope of business that has the greatest chance of success. This is an opportunity to make some hard Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-85478859233691148702009-02-17T10:11:00.000-08:002009-02-17T10:36:57.573-08:00StakeholdersRob was complaining this morning on Twitter about how much he hates the company's time tracking system. I think about HR applications from time-to-time, mainly as an example of how *not* to develop an application.Every HR time tracking application I've ever seen or used has the following problems:It is antiquated. Probably designed between five and ten years ago and purchased at a ridiculously Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-68267028186790747012009-02-09T14:27:00.001-08:002009-02-09T14:46:51.015-08:00HalfI wrote an article recently that I thought was pretty good. Perfect, in fact. Then I was told that it would need to be reduced by 400 words to fit the company's publication. It was 906 words. Cutting 400 worlds would eliminate half.I went through every section, paragraph and sentence and figured out how to reduce their respective lengths by half without losing anything important or meaningfulStevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-36616564266663572072009-02-03T15:44:00.000-08:002009-02-03T16:06:23.731-08:00Blogs Are MarCom Without The CatSee this excellent article from a Cisco blogger on Naked Conversations: Blogging in Global Corporations.I've heard this before. "We asked MarCom to set up a blog for our company but they can't/won't/didn't because they don't have the budget, don't know how, their dog ate their homework.." Whatever.Here's the deal. Marketing Communications isn't going to initiate or operate a corporate blog Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-88794445555531861332009-01-20T05:37:00.000-08:002009-01-20T05:54:03.908-08:00GlobalizationOne of the keys to globalization came ca 1970 with the international standardization of the shipping container. Much of our economy and standard of living depends on the ability for China to ship me insane things like free McDonalds Happy Meal toys or a 20lb iron anvil at virtually no cost. Low shipping costs are part of the equation that makes it easier for me to buy goods from China than it Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-5433244982149049102009-01-14T12:00:00.000-08:002009-01-14T12:18:33.398-08:00Design and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceFor years I’ve advocated John Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” to any engineer who will listen. Pirsig’s philosophical rant has a lot to say about quality and craftsmanship that provides deep thinking to the mechanic and the programmer alike. Most recently some design discussions came up that reminded me of Prisig’s book. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-65293539868337306302009-01-12T09:57:00.001-08:002009-01-12T10:12:25.328-08:00More on Holistic Security (and non-functional requirements)See Brent's comments to my post on designing security into products towards the bottom.As Brent says, "..making the security properties explicit, you can make sure they carry all the way to code." That's what's often missing, some up-front thought and explicit goals, which can have quite an influence on the code.Like performance criteria, this is one of the mostly non-functional areas that Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-23305294415042184732009-01-10T06:57:00.000-08:002009-01-10T07:14:56.523-08:00A Holistic Approach to Security in Product DevelopmentOur company's entire product line is becoming increasingly IP based. This means that our systems are more interconnected with the customer’s IT environment than they were before. Customers are well aware of the security risks to their networks and systems. So we have to respond aggressively to ensure that our products fit well within a variety of secure environments.I'm working on a Product IT Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-18251306921915318182008-12-30T08:31:00.000-08:002008-12-30T10:00:22.551-08:00Office Space, Part 2Brent's post on Office Space requires some additional commentary on my part. Just to qualify, at an older institution like JPL there are some pretty cozy, and fairly randomly organized engineering spaces that were repurposed from older offices in 1950's era buildings. The older part of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility for example--where 10base2 snaked through the building and the wooden floors Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-39859844572392955532008-12-17T06:43:00.000-08:002008-12-17T06:55:24.169-08:00How Do I Manage Seasoned Programmers?This recent post on Slashdot caught my eye. My advice:Take genuine and deep interest in what they do. Celebrate their successes and get involved in their problems. Most programmers do what they do because they enjoy the work. They want somebody to appreciate their work, and they want somebody to understand the difficulties.Understand what excites them and brag on this work. Be clear about Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-26647481582090527932008-12-15T14:54:00.000-08:002008-12-15T15:09:19.313-08:00Martin Fowler on DSLsMartin Fowler's post on Domain Specific Languages reminds me of the time we did a study of user performance of a graphical workflow editor. The graphical workflow editor is really a DSL represented with a graphical user interface. The domain is workflow automation. The language is some workflow description language--or in this case the graphical tool used to write the workflow description. Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-90741508642002816402008-11-21T06:55:00.000-08:002008-11-21T07:05:18.154-08:00Give Thanks to "Do What I Mean"This post on using airport codes in google maps is old news to me--I discovered this one time when I wanted directions from an airport, so I typed in the airport code and Maps was smart enough to do what I wanted.This is a great place to live. We have systems now like Google that fetch what we mean even if that's not what we say. We have the luxury of dynamic languages like Ruby/Python that areStevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-13258903992907218182008-10-31T06:38:00.000-07:002008-10-31T07:06:14.401-07:00Why software estimation is so hardI once worked with a guy at JPL who had an uncanny ability to give extremely accurate estimates. You could give him a problem, he could sketch it on the whiteboard, then give you an estimate. He would usually use a 10% margin of error (say, 80 hours +/- 8). And he was always dead-on. I thought it was amazing, and assumed it was because he was such a skilled programmer. I noticed something Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-5586360587523463992008-10-24T09:36:00.000-07:002008-10-24T10:59:47.864-07:00Software Engineer in TestSince Mike Kirby (one of our Whitebox test team leads) doesn't have a blog, I thought I'd post some of our "Software Engineer in Test" training materials. These are the subject areas and techniques we expect our Test Engineers to understand and the skills we want them to have to effectively perform whitebox testing in our group.Software Engineer in Test level 1:Week 1 IntroductionRead the Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17310404.post-25898805298587663232008-09-20T06:38:00.000-07:002008-09-20T06:39:56.054-07:00Seriously, one pageFriend of mine is looking for job hunting advice. Here it is:Keep you resume to one page, seriously.I've read about a gazillion resumes. I can tell you for a fact that when an employer (or a recruiter) picks up your resume they want more than anything for you to be "the one." They don't like sourcing candidates. They want to get it over with. So they're on your side until you disqualify Stevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02008117692180284514noreply@blogger.com0