In my previous articles about the Guardians of the realm and the Servants of the realm, I talked about different types of roles within the software development life-cycle. This time, I’m going to talk about a different breed of people: the ones who innovate and implement the ideas that move an entire organisation forward… Continue reading
FMA, or FMEA (Failure modes and effects analysis) is the old-fashioned way of hunting down all the ways in which things can go pear-shaped, in the hopes that such events could be avoided. I was reminded of it when I came across a random article using fault trees to illustrate ways in which modern disk drives (capacious as they’ve become) are more prone to fail. But I’m not gonna be talking about disk drives… Continue reading
[updated 2009-10-27]
In my next piece about roles in the software realm, I tackle the people who actually build software applications…
I thought it would be handy to have a roundup of all the players involved in software projects, and how they are related. In this post, I will start with the ‘guardians’, the people who are responsible for the software produced and who shepherd it from one environment to the other. Continue reading
Building and managing systems in a tried-but-not-necessarily-tested way must be a very useful thing to be able to do. Why else would there be so many instances of this practice? Throw in a prevailing belief that there isn’t time or money to allow for ‘best practices’, and you’re practially building something almost entirely for the sake of getting it out the door: Delivery becomes the superordinate goal. But so what? Continue reading
Years back, sitting in computer science classes, we heard about the software methodologies of the day. We also wanted to claw our eyes out with sheer boredom. Even in the halls of academia, where all that is theoretical and impractical can find many happy adherents; even there, the usefulness of the SDLC was questioned.
We students had already made up our minds – we were never gonna use these antiquated processes invented by European men with names that sounded far more antiquated and fuddy-duddy than I’m sure they actually were. We were going to carve out our digital futures with wit alone… Continue reading