Interactive ASP.NET

This post over at The Eternal Universe is a physicist complaining about how he’s not seeking a computer science degree, yet he has to keep learning computer languages just to publish physics papers. He should have read my previous post about the Law of Lossy Requirements . The cheapest way to capture...

In my post on “code is really design” post, I mentioned that I would further address the paradox that software is created in “thoughts units” but the most important people to the success or failure of a project are the sponsor and customer . In this post, I’ll explore that paradox further by discussing...

Lossy Compression In computer science, compression is an indispensible tool. Anyone familiar with .zip files knows what I mean. Interestingly, there are two kids of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless compression is like .zip compression, you put a file of, say, 100kb in and the end result is a...

Abstraction vs. Precision in Requirements I used to be an instructor for Rational Software’s RequisitePro software, which included a class called “Requirements College.” This useful class helped teach people how to elicit requirements from their customers. Three things that really stuck...

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. – George Patten This sounds like good advice doesn’t it? It is, actually, but we need to understand it correctly. The first thing we need to notice is that there is no objective difference...

In a previous post I mentioned Robert Glass’ “fact” that estimates are made at the beginning of the project before the problem is even defined, thus the estimate is invalid from the get go. While I don’t disagree with Glass, I do believe he is under estimating (pun intended!) why we human’s prefer estimates...