In the 1960s, it was considered a baseline good practice in software engineering to test your code as you wrote it. The pioneers of software development in that era were proponents of various levels of testing; some advocated “unit” testing and some didn’t, but all recognized the importance of testing code. Executable tests may have first been introduced by Margaret Hamilton on the Apollo project in the mid-1960s, where she originated a type of executable checking that we now call “static code analysis.” She called it “higher-order software,” by which she meant software that operates against other software rather than…

Warning: This may be a little bit preachy. If so, it’s only because I’m a little bit frustrated by it. Tying Up Loose Ends at Home We’ve had a bad habit at our house over the years. When we used a tool, we’d neglect to put it back in its proper place. The next time someone needed the tool, we’d spend more time looking for it than it took to use it for the task at hand. The pathetic thing is this was true even if it was the same person who used it last. It was often faster to…

A non-controversial title: Three words that have clear, unambiguous, consistently-understood meanings. If you use one of those words, everyone immediately understands exactly what you mean, and vice versa. Right? Well, okay, maybe not so much. From Three to One These three words have been bandied around the software community for more years than I can count. That’s because I only have ten fingers. Recent discussions in both meatspace and cyberspace have led me to reconsider their meanings. It occurs to me we’ve been making a mistake in our discussions of these words; all of us, all these uncounted years. We’ve…

Business agility means having the capability to “turn on a dime” at low cost and with low risk, to drive innovation, respond to market changes, and overcome the competition. In any enterprise that depends heavily on information systems, business agility is not possible without technical agility. Companies that adopted information technology in the mid-20th century have built up large-scale operations around principles, methods, and tooling from an era when thorough up-front planning was an accepted good practice, and when “computer” meant “mainframe.” Their IT organizations are designed and built for that approach from the ground up. They face challenges in…

My home office has a window. The window has plantation shutters. When I work at home, I usually open the shutters all the way to fill the room with natural light. One fine day not too long ago, I opened the shutters just a little. The room was lighted more softly. I felt energized and I had a great work day. On an internal Slack channel, I told my colleagues that I had Hawthorned myself. I had changed the ambient lighting in my work space, and the result was improved effectiveness. They didn’t buy it. What? Sorry? Oh, yeah. I…