7 years, 10 months ago

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss, Just Good Tactics

There’s an old saying about what happens when you assume. The fast lane to asininity seems to run through the land of hubris. Anshu Sharma’s Tech Crunch article, “Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy”, illustrates this: Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you […]

7 years, 11 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 373

This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 373, features Tom’s essay on #NotImplementedNoValue and a Form Follows Function installment on simplistic mental models. Tom and I discuss my post “All models may be wrong, but it’s not a contest to see how wrong you can be”, talking about cognitive […]

7 years, 11 months ago

All models may be wrong, but it’s not a contest to see how wrong you can be

The one thing you can be sure of is that nothing is dependent on only one thing. Michael Feathers‘ tweet last week brought this to mind: Too often we construct simplistic mental models that fail to account for outcomes that are possible, but inconvenient for us in some way. As Aneel noted while discussing OODA […]

8 years, 23 days ago

We Deliver Decisions (Who Needs Architects?)

What do medicine, situational awareness, economics, confirmation bias, and value all have to do with all have to do with the architectural design of software systems? Quite a lot, actually. To connect the dots, we need to start from the point of view that the architecture is essentially a set of design decisions intended to […]

12 years, 7 months ago

Nogility

Large technology organizations don’t simply become agile. They’re either agile or not. If they’re not, the path to being so is via change, often radical change at that.

12 years, 8 months ago

Unprincipled Architecture

Anything IT does should be seen as consistent. Using words like “Principle” with the definition most people have for it is a sure-fire way to disappoint folks. It turns out that instead of a iron clad ‘always-will-do’ thing, our Principles are merely s…