Mary Poppendieck’s seminal work, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, lists the 7 wastes of manufacturing and maps them to software development, among other things. (In a recent webcast, Poppendieck added 3 more wastes to the list, and I’ll write about those in another post.) Of the original seven wastes, the one that I found most enlightening is that unfinished projects lying about is the equivalent of having excess inventory on hand. Continue reading Unfinished Projects = Costly Excess Inventory
Category Archives: Simplifying Business
ProductCamp at UC Irvine Sat 2/27/2010
Product Managers and Project Managers will be gathering for an “unconference” at U.C. Irvine next Saturday. It’s free to sign up for anyone who’s interested. Go to http://www.productcampsocal.org to sign up to attend and also to vote on the sessions you’d like to see.
One of the proposed sessions is being led by Barbara Nelson of Pragmatic Marketing. She’s was my instructor when I took the Pragmatic Marketing course six years ago, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing her again. If her participation is any indication of the general caliber of this event, then we all stand to gain greatly. See you there.
“Why are manhole covers round?”
The famous Microsoft interview process (as described by William Poundstone in "How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle…") asks the candidate, among other things, to solve puzzles such as the quintessential question, “Why are manhole covers round?” It’s a question with multiple answers (see below), and the interviewer is looking for how the candidate approaches the question more than what answers are givens.
I view this question as a quintessential example of simplicity. Continue reading “Why are manhole covers round?”
Top 5 Ways to Keep a Software Development Project On Track
These tips originally appeared in an old version of this article. I’m reprinting them here for the convenience of a friend who asked about it. Basically, I maintain that good communication is the number one success factor to any project. Continue reading Top 5 Ways to Keep a Software Development Project On Track
pivotaltracker.com, so far, so good
I started playing with pivotaltracker.com today, which is a free, hosted storyboard tool. It’s free, but not open source, so you do not have the option of hosting it yourself, which means you’ll have to trust Pivotal Labs with your data. This includes: trusting that the service will remain up, trusting that the service will remain free, trusting that Pivotal won’t use your data to compete with you, etc. Some of these issues can be mitigated (e.g. by performing frequent exports of your data.)
Trust issues aside, so far, so good. Continue reading pivotaltracker.com, so far, so good
Role-Based Security and Separation of Concerns
In a side conversation at the Orange County APLN meeting last week, we got to talking on the subject of role-based security, and I said that there should be a strict separation between permissions and roles, and between roles and users. That is, that the programmers should code their security checks only against permissions (never directly against roles or users), and, going the other way, that users should only be assigned roles (never assigned permissions directly). Continue reading Role-Based Security and Separation of Concerns