Excel shouldn’t serve as load-bearing infrastructure. Its files can’t be diffed, version controlled, or tested. Virginia’s failure shows the cost of doing so.
Author Archives: Waldo Jaquith
Pity Francis M. Wilhoit.
You’ve got to feel for Francis M. Wilhoit. He’s most remembered for one, brief quote…which he never wrote.
Car buyback offers are bad CX.
Car buyback offers propose to make customers’ lives worse. This is not a compelling proposal.
Apple Card account verification considered harmful.
My wife was startled awake from her nap by her iPhone’s ring. She answered, groggily. The caller informed her that they were calling from Apple, and needed to verify her account. This made a sort of sense, because just the day prior, she’d communicated with customer support about a problem with our new, Apple-branded credit …
Continue reading “Apple Card account verification considered harmful.”
Procurement smells.
Major government software procurements fail at a high rate. There are a lot of methods of reducing the odds of failure, but how do you know if that’s necessary? Developers talk about “code smells”—small things that are off in ways that indicate that there may be larger problems. So, too, are there procurement smells—the little …
The disconnect between software development and government contracting.
There’s a big disconnect between modern software development practices and government contracting. It can seem intractable, but there is a solution. It’s the job of contracting officers to get government the best value for their money. That means being sure that they’ll get precisely what they need, within budget and on time. Normally, the best …
Continue reading “The disconnect between software development and government contracting.”
Never contract for story points.
When contracting for Agile software development services, sometimes contracting officers make “story points” the thing that they’re buying. This is an enormous mistake, on a couple of levels, and nobody should ever do it. Let’s talk about why. First, let’s define “story points.” Agile development teams need to figure out what they’re going to work …
Reduce bids by reducing uncertainty.
When government agencies procure custom software, the price tag is often driven up because the agencies are unwilling or unable to reduce the complexity prior to beginning the acquisition process. The complexity and associated uncertainty is obvious to vendors, so when asked to provide a firm fixed price bid, they’re going to price it for …
Government should procure custom software as open source.
Government software becomes vastly better when it’s procured as open source. Normally, government buys closed-source custom software. Government never looks at the source code. The public can’t inspect it. Is it any good? No, it is not. There is no incentive to make it good. In fact, there’s a perverse incentive: hard to maintain means …
Continue reading “Government should procure custom software as open source.”
Vote ”yes“ on VA’s redistricting constitutional amendment.
Gerrymandering persists because it’s the rational choice for elected officials. The way electoral districts are drawn in most of the U.S. is that state legislators decide what they want their districts to look like. The majority party that controls the legislature draws their own districts to allow them to cruise to reelection, using fancy redistricting …
Continue reading “Vote ”yes“ on VA’s redistricting constitutional amendment.”