Martin Fowler recently posted PreferFunctionalOrganization. Here, his functional organization means “organize around the business functions,” what management would call a project-based organization and his technical organization means “organize around the technical functions,” what management would call a functional-based (development, test) organization. There’s another option, that I didn’t see on Martin’s site, the matrix organization. […]
I’m a big fan of emergent schedules (see the rolling wave planning and low tech scheduling entries). I also write that way. I generally have an idea of what I’m going to say, but I’m never quite sure how I’m going to get there until I’m done writing. Emergent design also works for me as
I was at the Rational User Conference last week. I took away one significant idea from the keynotes and one of the track sessions: Writing software, according to Grady Booch is a “priviledge and a responsibility.” Systems are becoming more complex because we need them to do more things faster. We need people who
After reading Where Are the Women — And Their Names?, I tried to leave this comment on the FC blog, but was unable to, so I’ll post it here: I hope the trend is for people to make choices that fit for them. My daughters have my husband’s name. We only have trouble traveling when
Esther and I are working together this week, starting over again with the management book. This time, we’re pair-writing, and it worked surprisingly well today. We collaborate — and we have conflict, where the person at the keyboard says, “Oh no, I’m not writing that down.” However, we worked until about 5:30 today, when
My Stickyminds column this month is about testing dashboards. If you’ve seen something even better, I hope you post a comment there or here.
A colleague of mine, Brad Goldense, does a biannual survey about new product development practices. It’s time for another one. Here’s what he says: Is Product Development important to you and your company?
I’m a Tour de France addict. I bicycle like those guys only in my dreams. But when I was watching the race last night, I realized something: the riders who are in a position to win the Tour are adaptable riders. They don’t excel at just sprinting, or just mountains, or just rolling-hills, or
In general, technical people don’t seem to make great managers (unless they’ve been trying to become great). A result of that is what Reifer says in his IEEE Software (May/June 2004) column Catching the Brass Ring: “software professionals aren’t often tapped for top corporate leadership positions.” He goes on to say “executives of my
I now have a new hard drive. And I’m back from vacation. Thanks to the folks at MacResQ, I didn’t lose any data at all. (Truly amazing with a broken hard drive. If you need a chuckle, read commute mathematics. When I travel, I catch up on my magazine and journal reading. A nice side-effect