The period between Christmas and New Year always allows me some time for reflection that I typically don’t get during the rest of the year. Today I realised that I have now worked for five different companies over the past ten years, which started me thinking about the lessons that I have learned from these …
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The latest episode of Software Engineering Radio contains an interesting discussion about a project management technique known as Developer Anarchy. Fred George, the interviewee, defines anarchy as a group of people managing themselves, with few or no rules being imposed by higher levels of management. George describes how he first discovered this technique when working …
Organisational structure In his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks claimed that adding more people to a late software project would make it even later. His reasoning behind this claim, which has now become known as Brooks’ Law, was that people in a team need to communicate with each other. As the team grows …
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The pattern I like the idea of holding a daily stand-up meeting. This involves a team coming together at the start of each day to provide brief status updates and discuss the challenges ahead. I see stand-ups as being particularly useful in helping to resolve issues that are blocking progress, such as in this fictional …
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A personal perspective The first time I came across an error message telling me “oops, something has gone wrong…” was when I installed the LinkedIn app on my Windows Phone back in 2013. After a little research, I discovered that what this particularly unhelpful message was trying to tell me was that the time on …
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In preparation for my next Open University module, I have invested in getting an early copy of the set book so that I can start working through it at a nice relaxed pace. The book itself – Mastering the Requirements Process (Robertson and Robertson) – is a renowned text that deals with the specification of …
This weekend I have been reading the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer magazine that was kindly offered as a free download via their Twitter feed: COMPUTER MAGAZINE: Reminder/Download the first digital edition of 2015 for free! http://t.co/I3xmEBeGuc — IEEE ComputerSociety (@ComputerSociety) January 23, 2015 Two articles in this publication particularly caught my attention: Firstly, Hal Berghel’s cases …
Continue reading “Investigating the Internet of Things: Part 1”
Focus on processes, not technology This morning I was watching an inspirational video about the part Jeffrey Zeldman has played in shaping the web as we know it today. In the early days of the Internet, the life of a web developer was plagued by browsers that competed with each other by constantly releasing innovative yet proprietary features. Zeldman was instrumental in bringing about the widespread …
Over the Christmas holidays I have been reading the excellent book Conceptual Blockbusting: A guide to better ideas, by James L. Adams. The book begins by introducing several type of conceptual blocks, such as cultural conventions or restrictive thought patterns, that stifle creative problem solving, before going on to describe methods for busting through these barriers. …
The power and perils of OBD-II In 2010, the Centre for Automotive Embedded Systems Security demonstrated the devastating consequences that could arise should malicious attackers gain access to the on-board diagnostics port (OBD-II) that has been fitted to most vehicles since the mid 1990s. This collaborative group of academic researchers from the University of California San Diego and …