Technologies are coming and going faster than every before. In this environment, how can we provide companies with a good return for their software investment. Looking back, J2EE was all the rage. Software executives were banking on J2EE and making significant investments. The same thing happened with...

I have learned an important lesson from my combined experiences at all the places I've worked. That is: raw requirements cause waste. A term I've used (and have heard others use) is that requirements are either "baked" or "not baked". For a development team to plan an iteration...

I've been reviewing Jim Shore and chromatic 's upcoming Agile book, and I especially like the "No Bugs" section here: http://jimshore.textdriven.com/Agile-Book/no_bugs.html Large, dusty bug databases abound. Some teams have a process where this is unavoidable. Some teams use a bug database...

This is a planned follow-on to my first post on hiring. In my first post, I talked about the general process I like to go through when hiring a new programmer. Of course, you can bet that this is continually evolving based on what works and what doesn't. So far, this is working very well. When hiring...

With unemployment at essentially ZERO these days, it's hard finding the best people, especially skilled knowledge workers like programmers. Every company needs programmers, so the good ones who happen to be looking are few and far between. By contrast, the mediocre to poor programmers are abundant and...