Dec 25 2006
Developers are from Magrathea, Customers are from Ursa Minor Beta
From the naïve view of an average enterprise software developer, the situation today is a bit insane. Most customers will always choose more functionality and faster delivery over testing and documentation - not to mention GUI polishing. They will look you in the eye, tell you that they sincerely understand the software will have problems once it is live, and then come back furious when the software does not work. As if we were not all speaking the same language, somewhere the meaning of ‘it will have problems‘ gets lost in translation. Or maybe it’s not the definition of ‘problems‘, but the definition of ‘done‘1, or maybe developers and customers really come from different planets. Continue Reading »
Logs are external interfaces to software systems, and while normal external integration layer APIs are given much thought and care, logs are typically generated just by dumping ad-hoc messages, making them unnecessarily hard to use. Following these few simple guidelines can make lives of both developers and support much easier in the long term. 
by Edward Yourdon is an interesting study of high-risk software projects, which would normally be expected to fail - author defines a death march as a project for which an unbiased risk of failure is greater than 50%. 
