Improving Wetware

Because technology is never the issue

Make Lists. Not Too Much. Mostly Do.

Posted by Pete McBreen 12 Dec 2009 at 09:59

Michael Pollan’s Eaters Manifesto - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. has spawned another that looks at time management - Make lists. Not too much. Mostly do..

time managment is another totally overdone subject, wouldn’t it be great to have a similar credo to simplify all this hackneyed advice on to do lists, productivity, time management systems, and the like? Then, sent from the productivity heavens, it came to me:

Make lists. Not too much. Mostly do.

Nice parallels to software development here, planning is useful, but the key thing is actually crating the software.

An amusing speculation about the Waterfall

Posted by Pete McBreen 10 Dec 2009 at 20:36

Tarmo Toikkanen has an interesting speculation about Why people still believe in the Waterfall model, putting the blame on the Royce paper that was trying to say that waterfall was not the way to do software development.

OK, so why do people still advocate the waterfall? If you look at the scientific articles on software engineering that discuss the waterfall, they all cite Royce’s article. In other words, they’re saying something like “The waterfall is a proven method (Royce, 1970).” So they base their claims on an article that actually says the opposite: that the model does not work.

Tarmo was not the first to run across this idea, but the interpretation of the problem is different.

Don’t draw figures or diagrams of wrong models, because people will remember them. And in the worst case that could cause hundreds of thousands of failed projects and billions of euros and dollars wasted for nothing.

Other people has written about The Waterfall Accident and Waterfall Model; not what was intended.