Jason Gorman uses a golf analogy to talk about estimation. I like his analogy, but he didn’t take it far enough for me. He left out a key element: we may not be playing golf. A typical sin committed by people who do studies of schedule slippages is to discuss average amounts of time to [...]

Matt Heusser is having a peer conference. I believe it’s his first. It’s on the topic of technical debt. The idea of technical debt seems to be that there are tasks you are free to neglect when building a technical artifact such as software, but if you neglect those tasks, you will incur a sort [...]

Paul Gerrard believes there are irrefutable testing axioms. This is not surprising, since all axioms are by definition irrefutable. To call something an axiom is to say you will cover your ears and hum whenever someone calls that principle into question. An axiom is a fundamental assumption on which the rest of your reasoning will [...]

In 1982, when I was still in high school, I read an article in Time Magazine about teenagers who worked as programmers. The article inspired me to quit school and go to work as a programmer, too. I’m writing about that as part of my book about self-education without self-discipline. Anyway, one of the kids [...]