Bob Williams

How do agile organizations age?

October 4th, 2010 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

Working in start-ups and newer organizations has advantages and disadvantages form working in large and more established organizations. With regards to age, more established organizations are likely to use the waterfall method, or a variation of it, for software development. Newer organizations with less people, and not having years of internal process augmentation tend to use more agile software development methods. Just look at how often new organizations such as Evernote and LinkedIn release small incremental improvements to their core product.

A question came to mind this week that we may not fully be able to answer yet. Will new organizations that start with agile software development methods keep those …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Process: friend and foe

August 7th, 2010 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

In my reading this week I came across a blog post from Tom Peters entitled Strategy: War on Systems. Tom talks about “systems” within an organization and while they are developed with good intentions, they often become inhibitors to achieving the organizational mission. I talk about this very subject quite a bit on my blog also. In fact while reviewing my notes for blog post ideas I found this entry:

“Software Development lessons learned (process is both friend and foe) – Software development friend and foe”.

This thought matches exactly with Tom’s thought about war on systems. Your software development process has steps that exist to produce output and serve …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Big Bang vs Evolution – A software look

July 1st, 2010 | One comment | Tags: , , ,

If you do any amount of reading today on current topics in software development you’ll find a growing community for agile development methods in addition to those using the more traditional waterfall development method. Large and/or older corporations tend to use the waterfall approach to software development because that was the standard that grew from process maturity over the last 30 years. Small and/or newer organizations tend to have some form of an agile method because they must produce software quickly to survive.

We are nimble in our approach

Some people live in an environment that practices waterfall but likes to talk in the terms of agile development. That’s …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Pork Barrel Software

March 11th, 2010 | One comment | Tags: , ,

If you have read any of my previous blog posts, you’ll know that I’m all about business process management and efficiency. For better or worse, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how organizations produce work. A common framework for many businesses to produce software releases is to have both a capital projects and an expense (run the business) model.  I’m not an accountant and don’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of

Don't let the pork in your software barrel

accounting rules, but I do know that generally accepted accounting principles allow for the capitalization of some software development costs as specified in Statement of Position …Continue reading >>

 
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