Wayne Allen's Blog

the spurious pundit has a really good post on how hard it is for manager types to do a good job of telling people what they want done. Snippets: First off, there's the mechanics of how to do it. What tools does he need? You know that there's a hammer… more »

In my previous post we had some good discussion regarding rule # 1: The best product managers follow the Pragmatic Marketing maxim: Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. Always use market facts to decide the best course of action. The genera… more »

From a copyrighted story at SoftwareCEO written by Bob Weinstein Software product management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it Product managers' rule #1: The best product managers follow the Pragmatic Marketing maxim: Your opinion,… more »

From Patrick Cauldwell's Blog - Firefox and Sharepoint Being a dedicated Firefox user, one of the few things that was still thwarting me was SharePoint.  We use SharePoint internally for a ton of stuff, and it was a drag to have to fall back to th… more »

Having recently been involved with a team that was being exhorted to "step up" and "go the extra mile" I noticed a range of responses from "lets go" to "why bother" to "I don't think so". After thinking about the response I identified several personal fa… more »

Brian Marick posted here and here about burnbown chart styles and I thought I'd chime in with my variation. I use a slight modification of Kelly's burndown. I always put the remaining work on top of the bar and use real dates across the bottom. Addition… more »

I was talking with Scott Hanselman (gratuitous name drop) about the difference between rpc and document style. It took me a moment since I don't deal with SOAP internals much any more. It occurred to me shortly thereafter that I don't really care other t… more »

Interesting bit of detective work the other day I thought I'd share with everyone. A friend of a friend was having trouble with an ASP 2.0 project that was ported to ASP.NET. Turns out that on some web servers the different clients were getting their dat… more »

Ask E.T. had a pointer to Dotplot. An entire software module of a telecommunications switch about two million lines of C. Seems to be some interesting visualization here. I'll have to keep this one in the memory banks for future use. more »

In many organization I've encountered there is this artificial distinction between the new development group and the maintenance programming group. Why on God's green earth would you want to do such a thing? Every time the topic comes up I point out tha… more »

From Project, Process & Business Improvement: Are You Loved? A.J. found in Executive Leadership this list of the 5 biggest complaints employees have about their bosses: Threats Inconsistency Wasting their time Micromanaging them Hypocrisy How many… more »

In reflecting on my previous post regarding shared libraries in VSS vs CVS I realized that the end of the post got to the real meat of the matter. Turns out we are using a feature of VSS to help us organize our shared libraries, however, shared libraries… more »

Saw this on StickyMinds today: Bumper Stickers for Testers My favorites: Software Testers: "Depraved minds...Usefully employed." Software Testers: We break it because we care. A good tester has the heart of a developer...in a jar on the desk. Friends d… more »

Via Clarke Ching In early 2003 Michael Crichton gave a fascinating Caltech Michelin Lecture titled  Aliens Cause Global Warming. He argued that a lot of today’s science is bad science and that bad science is often used to back up good… more »

Looks like the Agile United conference website is finally up (probably for a while, but I just noticed). The call for papers is also out. more »

Check out Clarke Ching's new book project Rolling Rocks Downhill. The purpose of the book is to help people – customers, managers, workers (and even their families) – who work on traditionally managed software development projects to find a b… more »

The Macau Productivity Center has released a PDF version of their book Essential Skills for Agile Development. It covers the basic development skills necessary for a programmer on an agile (XP specifically) team. Chapters begin with short descriptions… more »

I went to see The Incredibles (great film by the way) the other day at a theater I hadn’t been in before and I was struck by the difference as soon as I walked in the door. You buy your tickets the normal way (or online), but the snack bar has been… more »

FastCompany has an article on the 6 myths of creativity. Creativity Comes From Creative Types Money Is a Creativity Motivator Time Pressure Fuels Creativity Fear Forces Breakthroughs Competition Beats Collaboration A Streamlined Organization I… more »

From Scott Hanselman Here's a great little free util that Omar has found. I used to move the plugin's manually to speed things up, but PDF Speedup makes me NOT DREAD opening a PDF anymore. BTW, does Acrobat 6 suck LOTS more than Acrobat 5? I HATE the n… more »