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14
Jun 10
I’ve said it before and Jonathan Rasmusson said it again:
“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“
[emphasis added]
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10
Jun 10
Mark Pesce in his book The Playful World:
“For [the millennial child] the act of knowing something has become inseparable from the act of reaching for knowledge. She searches for what she needs to know; in a moment’s time, the answers are at hand. And anything known to anyone anywhere has become indistinguishable from what she knows for herself.”
Memorizing certain things has it’s value, but if you have the skills to find the answer to anything in 30 seconds using the smartphone in your pocket, what things are really worth memorizing? There are two things we should teach: the skill of searching and finding (ie, how to learn) and the skill to evaluate the quality of your sources. That’s it. Research and critical analysis.
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06
Jun 10
Monday Note did a little digging and discovered that the center of money in the computing world has less to do with the PC, and more to do with the smartphone market:
“Apple makes $3B of profit from its iPhone while HP takes in a mere $500M on its PCs—that’s a 6x difference. The Center of Money has shifted.”
HP is one of the leaders in computer manufacturing, yet for all their expertise, they have to be pretty surprised how fast the center shifted.
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02
Jun 10
Esther Derby has some advice about site (or application) navigation:
“Design global navigation last. Before designing global navigation, design screens with only local navigation–how people do the work of that screen. Then, as parts of the system are ready to release, create an application map that shows hub and spoke relationships, selection screens, modal screens and links and build just enough global navigation for the current feature set.”
I like the idea. Seems like it would generate more a more natural organization in the tool instead of a lot of artificial constructs used to categorize and sort the functionality ahead of time.
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29
May 10
Ran across this quote recently, thought you might enjoy it:
“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.”
- Watts S. Humphrey
From Wikipedia: “Watts S. Humphrey (born 1927) is an American software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality.”
He has a recent book out that looks like it could be good, Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself. Has anyone read it?
[via @jurgenappelo]
“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.” – Watts S. Humphrey
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