I frequently read and hear that software developers must take care to deliver the right solutions. It’s a waste of time, money, and effort to build the wrong thing. Customers aren’t interested in the wrong thing. It’s true. But it’s often misunderstood. The Developers Who Don’t Do Anything Many developers I’ve met interpret “don’t build […]

This one is for software developers. One of the basic ideas of agile software development is that the requesters of software have the primary responsibility to understand customer value and to explain “the What” to the people who build solutions; while the makers have the responsibility to determine “the How” when they build solutions. Yet, […]

Warning: Snark alert. I read something recently – might have been on social media somewhere, but I don’t recall exactly – a story about how test-driven development (TDD) had caused a software development team to allow a defect into their product. The feature in question was a funds transfer operation. A customer could use the […]

When it comes to software development tools, bigger is better. Apparently. Feature Bloat Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) keep growing. Some of them have so many features I don’t even know all the things they can do. The world in my window High-end IDEs can display many different panels giving various views into system configuration settings, […]

Years ago we lived in Ohio. In our front yard there was a circular bed with a small tree in the center, surrounded by thick shrubbery. The shrubs throve, but the tree looked as if it was barely alive. We called in a tree specialist and he told us the bad news: The tree was […]