I have noticed that the people who
are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait
for them. – E.V. Lucas, English author
The further backward you look, the
further forward you can see. –Winston Churchill
The author presents two of the most common mistakes in software projects that often cause irreparable harm to the project: hopeless optimism when it comes to planning and scheduling and failure to address actual or potential problems as soon they are recognized. He goes on to discuss how we can learn from mistakes to improve future decision-making.
Often analysts and developers emphasize the use of one-on-one interviews with business customers to obtain requirements. This article outlines some other useful techniques that can help to ensure that all relevant requirements are elicited in a timely manner.
Many projects leave the participants feeling less than satisfied with the outcome. People often feel they were rushed and had to make compromises that they would rather have not made. Furthermore, the "lessons learned" (postmortem) process is often done half-heartedly and decisions and actions from the sessions are rarely followed through or up on. This article discusses, in detail, some practical techniques to make the "lessons learned" productive and useful.
Article from the Communications of the ACM that identifies top risk factors in software development projects. Further, the authors develop a process/methodology for identifying, assessing, and creating mitigation strategies for risks. The article takes a very practical approach. Highly recommended.
This presentation/article explores the situation in which better test practices are put in place, but the resulting quality of the end product decreases. It identifies some of the tell-tale signs of a development project and it's associated test effort falling in a "death spiral".
Presents a view of the value of an overall approach to quality assurance (QA) in the software development arena. Emphasizes that QA goes beyond testing.
Bob Glass, a proponent of "extreme programming", outlines his view of software inspections. Very interesting article in light of the recent software testing training regarding software inspections.
This short article explains how modern computer and operating systems manage the various types of system memory, including physical memory, virtual memory, and memory-mapped files.
This two-part series of articles provides some simple and practical advice on planning an effective meeting and techniques to ensure that the actual meeting stays on track and accomplishes the planned objectives.
In this editorial, the CTO of Monster.com gives some advice about career success in IT. He focuses on those "soft" (non-technical) skills that are important to succeed not only in the technical realm, but also the business side.
This commentary looks at the myth of bandwidth oversupply and counters it with the matter of access being the main constraint on the growth of optical networking.
Overview of Global Crossing's foray into the "media extranet" market and how they are courting the big Hollywood studios and players to gain dominance in this market.
This is one of 78 interviews with leaders in the telecom industry about their view of the economy how their companies are positioning their enterprises for success.
http://www.telecomclick.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=7&releaseid=6380&magazinearticleid=104045
Floppy Image does one thing and it does it well. It simply creates image files of floppy disks (3-1/2" 720kB or 1.44MB) as files for backup or archiving purposes and then allows you to restore them to floppy. It even allows you to create an image file as a self-extracting archive so you can re-create the floppy disk without the application itself. The image files are compressed, so they take up less space than a simple copy of the floppy itself. Very handy for backing up a customized boot floppy.
PowerMenu adds some very useful options to the window menu (the menu under the application icon in the upper left corner), including
Other applications exist that can do each of these things, but PowerMenu uniquely combines them into one simple, unobtrusive package.
In MS
Project, if you have a number of sequential tasks (i.e., each task is
dependent on the task immediately above/preceding it), these tasks can
quickly be linked (dependencies added) instead of typing in each line
item ID in the Predecessor column. To do so, select all of the
tasks starting at the top of the sequence and selecting
Edit | Link Tasks from the menu (or using the <Ctrl>+<F2>
keyboard shortcut).
At one
time or another, you'll want to look at all of your formulas in a spreadsheet
to try to figure why a particular one is not giving you the expected
result. Instead of manually navigating to each cell to look at its
formula, press <Ctrl>+~ (tilde). Excel will change the contents
of cells with formulas from the results to the formula itself. Just
hit <Ctrl>+~ to return the spreadsheet to showing the formula
results.
In MS
Word, the question mark ("?") can be used as a wildcard in
the Search and Replace window. You must use the exact number of question
mark placeholders as the number of characters that you are searching
for.
Have you ever wanted to just put the whole online thing on the shelf for a while? This site does just that. Go ahead. Push the red button. No one will know! [Note: This site shows a very clever use of JavaScript.]