Scrum-team years give program teams, budgeting, procurement, and oversight a common currency of understanding.
Tag Archives: software
“Customized COTS” is the worst of both.
It’s a tar pit, a way to pay for extensive renovations to software that you do not own, and now feel that you cannot leave, because the sunk cost fallacy is real.
Why governors put this over here, with the rest of the fire.
When presented with a disastrous, multi-year, failing, mission-critical software project, a governor will double down on the failing strategy. Here’s why.
An Excel error caused a $202 million state budget shortfall.
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.
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.”
How to get started with continuous integration.
I’ve put off learning to use continuous integration tools for a few years now. There’s never a good time to complicate my development process. But today I finally did it. It works differently than I thought, and was easier than I expected, so it’s worth documenting the process for others. I have a non-trivial number of GitHub …
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Links for December 25th
New York Times: Climate Scientists Hampered in Study of 2011 Extremes“'I’ve been a meteorologist 30 years and never seen a year that comes close to matching 2011 for the number of astounding, extreme weather events,' Jeffrey Masters, a co-founder of the popular Web site Weather Underground, said last month. 'Looking back in the historical record, …
Links for May 5th
Wikipedia: Timeline of Web BrowsersA family tree for web browsers. There are a lot of browsers here I hadn't thought of for years. HotJava, ViolaWWW, and Cello, in particular. Voice of America: Historian Recounts Role of Chinese Americans Who Fought in US Civil WarIn 1861, there were only 200 Asians living in the Eastern U.S. …