Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
From Part 1There have been four ages of mankind. The first was the Age of Speech; for the first time humans could “learn by listening” rather than “learn by doing”; that is, data could be accumulated, communicated, and stored by verbal communicat…
Another weekend, another too good to pass up Twitter conversation during my “unplugged” time. This weekend, Grady Booch hooked me by retweeting Mike Potts tweet: Mike’s tweet was a reply to Grady’s comment on the latest news out of Uber: It’s an understandable question. It’s a reasonable question. It’s one that came up back […]
I try to be disciplined about my writing (picking themes, creating a backlog, collecting notes and links on those topics, etc.), but it seems like serendipity won’t be denied, no matter what I do. On the same day that XKCD published this cartoon, Erik Dietrich published “Software Architect as a Developer Pension Plan”. While I […]
Gregory Brown tweeted a great series on the problem of distance last week: It’s amazing how much information can be conveyed in nine tweets. It’s amazing how many aspects of a very complex socio-technical undertaking, software development, are affected by this concept of distance. I would argue that this concept of distance applies likewise to […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 381, features Tom’s essay on Agile adoption, Kim Pries talking about technology’s gender gap, and a Form Follows Function installment on the fallacy of greenfield development. Tom and I discuss my post “The Seductive Myth of Greenfield Development”. We talk about how […]
Ian Bogost’s “Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers” in the Atlantic, claims “The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry.” He goes on to state: When it comes to skyscrapers and bridges and power plants and elevators and the like, engineering has been, and will continue to be, managed partly by professional standards, and partly […]
Analogies are never perfect, but reading Erik Dietrich’s “Do Programmers Practice Computer Science?” brought one to mind. Software development has much in common with the practice of medicine. Software development, like medicine, involves the application of knowledge. Also like medicine, this application is made complex by considerations of context. Yet another commonality is that in […]
We talk about bit rot, and information death. But there is a corollary – fact rot, and truth death. Either I am loosing my mind, or I have fallen into the incongruity of a bad television script and it’s 1994 again. In the last few days I have lost large chunks of time and have […]
Skills, best practice and business alignment mean outsourcing is here to stay (First published in ComputerworldUK) Is the IT offshoring trend we have seen over the last few decades now beginning to reverse whereby outsourcers and their customers are beginning … Continue reading →
I subscribe to the free investigative reports generated by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO). For my foreign readers and those not familiar with GAO, the agency describes itself as follows: "The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an…
I subscribe to the free investigative reports generated by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO). For my foreign readers and those not familiar with GAO, the agency describes itself as follows: "The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an…
In the first part of the discussion, drawing upon the genesis of Agile and CMM, we were left wondering if the two are “The Misfits”, and most likely to disappoint the pacifists, or can they become soul-mates after all. The … Continue reading →