Something’s Wrong With Developers

Previous: Something’s Wrong With Management A set of lies has persisted for the past fifty or sixty years (really) that interferes with our ability to clearly define software and software developers. Let’s agree to drop the pretense and try to see developers clearly. Let’s begin with what a software developer is not (and what software […]

Something’s Wrong with Management

Previous: We’ve Been Wrong for Fifty Years Suggestions for why non-technical managers so often fail when trying to manage technical projects and technical people range from arrogance to ignorance. Most likely it’s a combination plus what some humorous technical old-timers call the impedance mismatch. This reference to electrical design describes an overload that occurs when […]

We’ve Been Wrong for Fifty Years

When any critical eye sweeps over the software development landscape, even a cursory look reveals dysfunction, misunderstanding, failure, incompetence, and distrust. It’s no one person or one group’s fault. Those managers closest to the problem, like agile coaxers and scrum lords, refuse to see, or even acknowledge the pain and suffering in the development community. […]

Gedankenexperiment

Albert Einstein famously used thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment) to convey complex and difficult concepts with his peers and colleagues. Gedankenexperiment reduced the mental overhead and laboratory costs and helped the experimenter think through situations that, possibly, exist beyond a physical experiment. No one disputes an on-going and stressful dynamic exists between middle-management and software developers. This […]

What Developers Do

We have mislabeled our effort Whether waterfall or agile or anything in between, the past forty years have demonstrated that software development demands a different perspective than preceding human endeavors. I am loathe to call software development “production” or “assembly” or any of the other words conventionally used to describe 19th-century production. Our failure to […]