(…) Gore has been a team-based, flat lattice organization that fosters personal initiative. There are no traditional organizational charts, no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams. We encourage hands-on innovation, involving those closest to a project in decision making. Teams organize around opportunities and leaders emerge.
Tag Archives: Software
iPhone SDK 3.0: A New Beginning
Last year I blogged about the upcoming SDK 2.0 for the iPhone 3G, and boy did it change my life. For those who haven’t followed closely everything that happened in this blog lately, there’s been this (that’s me in the WWDC keynote main room at the Moscone center) and then that (yours truly talking at the first ever European iPhone conference). All of this has been the result of going to San Francisco last June. That particular trip changed everything; I never thought that a simple plane ticket could generate this much.
The iPhone has literally changed my professional life. But it was only the beginning. Last Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone SDK 3.0, and I’ll expose here some thoughts about what’s coming next. Continue reading
Olé, olé, olé
I just stumbled into this amazing TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert via James Duncan Davidson (@duncan in Twitter) and I want to share it with you with some very personal thoughts below.
The Dirty Little Secret of iPhone Development
This is happening right now, at a web agency near you.
The dot-com boom of the 90′s spawned a brand new generation of coders and software developers, including me, by the way. While before that time the term of “software developer” might have been reserved to system programmers fluent in C, COBOL, C++ or other languages, right now the vast majority of developers I know spend their time writing web applications, either public or in a private intranet, in J2EE, ASP.NET, Rails, PHP, you name it.
I have said before that writing web applications should be taken as seriously as writing desktop systems. Call me names if you want, but I’m a big fan of Joel’s Test.
However, after all this years, after the Chaos reports, after Peopleware, after the Mythical Man Month, people still treat quality as an afterthought. And also complain about how much software sucks, how expensive it is, and how late it arrives, by the way. Now that the iPhone SDK is widely available, that the App Store is selling more apps that we could have had imagined 6 months ago, many web agencies want to jump to native iPhone development contracts, which are hype and nice and pricey and whatnot. Which is only going to make things worse.
The dirty little secret in this story is this: iPhone development looks more like developing applications for a desktop operating system, and less, much less than web development. And I’m frightened to see some small shops (and even bigger ones), who never attained a real level of professionalism or quality in their software tasks, starting projects and realizing, later, when they are over budget and behind schedule, that this kind of applications requires a different mindset.
Dangers of Prototyping
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has written about prototypes, saying that they are not only useful but strictly fundamental pieces of the overall software process, as in many other engineering activities. He gives the example of a pilot chemical plant, prepared to process 10’000 units per day instead of the 2 million units a day that the final plant would have to handle, in order to demonstrate the feasibility and uncover some unforeseen problems.
He summarizes his opinion in the famous phrase “plan to throw one away” (Brooks, 1995, page 116), underlining the problem of change management: managing change, right from the beginning of the project, instead of ignoring or avoiding it, is particularly important in software projects, since it presents a solid mindset for all stakeholders in order to avoid scope creep, schedule and staffing problems. Continue reading
Saving a Failing Project
In 2006 I had the opportunity to work as a “project leader” into a small failing project. Three developers were working in an ad hoc basis, creating a software application for an important client (a government office in Lausanne), without any kind of detailed formal specification, without any kind of design documentation, and with strong pressure from the management to release the application, even if not in an usable state. Needless to say, the project was also beyond budget.
I had just joined this company a couple of days ago, and the management asked me to take the project in charge. Not an easy task, particularly because it was my first experience of this kind. Continue reading
Adding Manpower
Published in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field. The book author, Frederick P. Brooks Jr., used his experience as the project manager of the IBM System/360 and its software, the Operating System/360, to explain a common set of problem patterns, applicable to other software projects as well.
One of the most famous citations in the book is the one regarding the consequences of adding human resources to a late project; this article will provide a couple of thoughts about this assertion, and highlight some contrariwise opinions. Continue reading
Certification
While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements.
When in some situations it is not legally possible to use the title “software engineer” without an engineering degree of some kind (for example, in some states of the USA or some institutions like the IEEE – http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/titleengineer.html), the term “software developer” is usually applied to people in charge of designing, writing and / or maintaining software-based systems. I will use the terms developer and engineer interchangeably in this discussion, which some people might think is not correct. Continue reading
Challenges for Software Engineers
Software Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved. Practicers have fiercely debated upon it through the years, given the extremely fast pace of the innovations in the field, and the extremely difficult and inherently dynamic nature of software. Many trends have appeared and vanished, and many others will come.
In this article I will provide a short overview of two kinds of challenges that I consider that software engineers will have to confront in the next 20 years: the human and the technical. Continue reading
App Store coming!
Seen in the preferences of iTunes 7.7, just released via Software Update:
When enabled, it adds the following icon to iTunes:
