Every time a Wall Street firm’s trading software goes rogue, or an international bank’s back-end IT hiccups, leaving customers stranded, an audible groan rises from our offices. We’re frustrated because we’re tired of seeing common — and preventable — mistakes slip through the cracks in what are supposed to be world-class software development organizations. Our goal is to let these organizations know just how easy it could be to improve the resiliency, security and performance of their enterprise systems. To that end, we’ve released an open letter to Chris Isaacson, the Chief Operating Officer at BATS Global Markets offering a five-point plan, as well as some friendly advice, on how … Read More
Tag Archives: structural quality
Raymond James’ Aha! Moment with Integrating Software Quality
When my organization decided to hire a new CTO, one of his top priorities was to look through our old support contracts and “cut the fat,” as it were. It was there, among the rubble, where we found a transformational tool that we had cast aside which could help us increase our development productivity and software quality. But in learning more about this tool we found that it hadn’t failed us, but rather, we failed it! So my brand-new boss gave me a brand-new ultimatum: Integrate this tool into our software development lifecycle, or we’re dumping it. The tool was CAST’s Application Intelligence Platform (AIP), used to increase an application’s … Read More
Fast or Nimble? Agile Should be Both
I was watching the gymnastics competition at the Olympics on Sunday night and on more than one occasion heard commentators applaud competitors for their agility. As I watched these gymnasts move swiftly and with exacting precision across the beam, floor, vault and bars, I could not help but marvel at their abilities and at how appropriate a descriptor “agile” was for them. Long before businesses tossed around the term “Agile” as a method of technology project management, it stood as a word that often affixed to people and objects that displayed a certain set of characteristics. People earning the moniker “agile” almost invariably were both fast and nimble – not … Read More
Mozzilla Thinks Crashes are a GOOD Thing…Really?
My six-year-old can tie her own shoes. I honestly did not realize how big of a deal that was until her teacher told me a few months ago that she had, for a short time, become the designated shoe tier in her classroom. Apparently, thanks to the advent of Velcro closures for kids’ shoes, nobody else in her kindergarten class knew how to tie their shoes. The problem with being a “star” of your kindergarten class, however, is that all the kids want their shoes tied by her. As a result, she was trying to tie shoes very fast – too fast, in fact – and started making mistakes, which … Read More
Are We Introducing Time Bombs into our Cloud-based Government Systems?
They are there all right, ticking time bombs in government IT systems, as they are moved from legacy to contemporary cloud architectures. It’s no secret that there are huge initiatives underway in the federal government to reduce cost by eliminating redundancy. The area of redundancy that administrators point to most is at the network and infrastructure level. As a result, there continues to be a massive shutdown of government-run data centers, with the organizations moving their systems to the cloud. Now, one data center can support an entire infrastructure. These colossal structural changes are saving taxpayers a ton of money. But will these moves keep the structural quality of the … Read More
Android Application Failures Still Try Our Souls
Happy Independence Day everybody! I only hope those of you reading this on your Android device have not turned it sideways or performed some other seemingly innocuous action that has made this application fail. I say this because I recently read yet another blog about “workarounds” to compensate for application failures inherent in Android devices. These pieces have become almost ubiquitous over the past 18 months to the point where one would think Google would just go back and perform the structural quality analysis it needs to do to address the issues. Their failure to do so reminds me on this day before Independence Day of the opening lines of … Read More
The Personnel Side of Technical Debt
I have been an East-Coaster all my life. I’ve lived, worked and even attended college in states that all lie East of the Mississippi. However, throughout my 18 years working in the technology business, my clients have been spread out around the U.S. and abroad. I’ve found myself doing phone calls before the sun rises and well after it has set. That’s just the way it is in this business. While it is admittedly easier to write about companies that are located in another state, I the remote worker hardly begins and ends with us writers. More often than not I’m working with companies that have developers, architects, managers, directors … Read More