Good designers come from a continuous observation, scrutiny and practice of the reflective conversation with the situation at hand. “[The designer] works in particulars situations, uses particular materials, and employs a distinctive medium and...

Why this is important? For me, this is important because as a practitioner of the trade I have a historical responsibility to layout the best possible base for future practitioners and for the future of the profession. What is it? It seems that...

It is very good to read how people using agile methods are helping with otherwise bad problems: Big IT, Doomed Comes to mind the excellent lecture by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.: "The Design of Design" Turing Award address at SIGGRAPH '00, (July 2000...

Why is important to learn Microsoft Common Intermediate Language (CIL)? In your role of software technology end-consumer, there is very little, almost non-existent need to. In your role of software technology producer, a software designer most...

Is object-orientation dead in the presence of service-oriented architecture? I just talked with a respected practitioner and author in our industry about future directions and advanced topics; he thinks that we as industry still need to understand...

I originally understood and believed (what I wanted to believe, in fact) that software development trade is a branch of engineering discipline. I studied the work of Watts Humphrey, Mark Paulk and others at SEI and related organizations, looking to improve...

There! That singular group over there! Can you see them? Yes! They all are there, in the landscape of software development practice, a singular group of software development practitioners, from past, present and future of this line of work. I can see...

Alternative title: How to get more benefits from the application of software to solve business problems? You know, there is no a single factor that detonate productivity and quality, in other words "there is no silver bullet". Productivity and quality...

Phillip G. Armour, in his work The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software , proposes that software is a mean for the preservation of knowledge as have been the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the brain, tools...

An opinion from one that had a degree in theoretic physics: “The next important moment in my life was in 1955 when I decided to become a programmer; I took that decision because I had concluded that of theoretic physics and programming, programming embodied...

There is a good design process shared by design professions like architecture, urban design or engineering, of course there are stylistic variations of this process but it is essentially the same for all schools of design within this family of design...

Systems Read system as any social, economical, mechanical, electrical, biological, or software system. I recommend the following book for a deeper appreciation of systems in general. See: General System Theory by Ludwig von Bertalanffy...

Microsoft Solutions Framework next version 4 explicitly includes elements from Agile Methods for software development [1], some of these elements will have built-in support [2] in next version of Visual Studio .NET Behind this evolution are modern...

Multi-paradigm design is an old time technique, as software designers we should be aware of what James O. Coplien said “Perfectly good paradigms have been marginalized by object-oriented hype” [Multi-Paradigm Design for C++] Look at...

Take test-driven development technique [ 1] for example, why people do not understand that it is a design technique and not a testing technique? [1] http://www.artima.com/intv/testdriven.html In order to understand something like this practice...

There is a common understanding about the importance of conceptual integrity, nowadays in the software industry. This typically shows in conversations about this notion called software architecture. This is good. But... …something that...

If you are designing an application test-drive using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Testers whose logic includes access to a database, then consider the following mechanism for the database related assertions (also known as specifications...

I remember the time when structured programming lessons first came into my attention. Control flow constructs like sequence, choice, loops, etc. In particular, the condition-controlled loop that places the condition test after the loop body, for example...

When agile development still was not called agile development, there were planning-oriented technicians —professional software design practitioners, that is— in a development project team all the way from the very beginning of the project to the actual...

Software Pioneers http://www.sdm.de/en/it-wissen/themen/sdmkonf-2001/index.html I found these videos and slides form people like: Ole-Johan Dahl Niklaus Wirth Fred Brooks Alan Kay Peter Chen Edsger W. Dijkstra C.A.R. Hoare David L. Parnas John Guttag...

Among 3 rd generation programming languages, C++ has been very successful; the amount of software in the world written in C++ is very substantial: C++ Applications http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html There should be no surprise why Microsoft...

A professional software designer —one whose next paycheck depends on the quality of her software— looks for an ever increasing acquaintance with his design tools. One of the most important design tools in software is the actual computing machine —abstract...

An artistic painter enjoys painting. That is a trait of artful making even when there is no fulfillment other than the act of painting in itself. The same could be said about problem-solving. Financial gratification could be part of the after-the-fact...

This is an update on my internal inquiry: What is software development, art or science? Not surprisingly, the act of programming digital computers is both, art and science. Now I know. Actually, the simple question “what is software development, art...

For those with critical thinking habits, let’s cogitate about this: If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these , won't the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?” —Donald E. Knuth Could...