At some point during this process, some concepts came to me that I had never considered before. I had always been a staunch member of the camp of developers who felt deep down that procedures such as Configuration Management were a complete waste of time at best and an active detriment to progress at worst. … Continue reading »
A storm was brewing and once again, I was in the middle of it. I had development managers sneaking over to my desk and asking me if I could take a look at some critical bugs, software developers asking me if I could help troubleshoot some code issues, and systems engineering managers standing on me … Continue reading »
When I took a job as a contract “systems engineer” for a large ship builder, I had no idea what I was going to be doing. Looking over my resume and seeing the (on paper) impressive track record I had for large software development projects – thank God resumes don’t typically list the current condition … Continue reading »
Configuration Management is probably one of the most dreaded and misunderstood tools that software projects have available to them. As a developer with over fifteen years of experience, I have to admit that I was blissfully unaware of it until four or five years ago. However, I had become very troubled by what I saw … Continue reading »
In the last article, I covered the basics of Project Integrity Management using a very flexible editing tool called TreeLine. Today I will continue to work with that same sample project to show some useful things that can easily be accomplished with TreeLine. In our example project, the very important ID property was omitted from … Continue reading »
About a year ago I discovered a wonderful application called TreeLine (http://treeline.bellz.org/) that is a little difficult to categorize. It is part text editor, part database, and part outliner, but it is flexible enough to be used for almost any type of outlining or data storage. A common use for it is to create outlines … Continue reading »
When talking about methods of managing the complexity of Project Integrity Management, the discussion inevitably turns to software solutions. This is a natural progression of logic for people who spend a large portion of their waking hours (and in some cases, a large portion of their sleeping hours) thinking about software. When a software developer … Continue reading »
The human mind has always sought to understand the world that it lives in, and the more that is understood about it, the more complex our world seems. Early civilizations understood their world in simple terms…day and night, sky, land and sea, animal, vegetable, mineral. As observations turned to the more methodical processes of science, … Continue reading »
The key to managing com complexity is breaking it down into smaller, related pieces. … Continue reading »
We hear it all the time…we must protect the environment. Cities have complex recycling systems in place, the EPA is passing more and more stringent environmental protection laws, and the concept of a “carbon footprint” has seeped into our regular vocabulary. But have you ever considered that the same ideas behind environmental conservation – the … Continue reading »