Risk factors rewritten as standard practices: twice the fun

Sez Who? has taken the offshore risk profile and rewritten them as recommendations. Sadly, his piece is apparently in use at more companies than mine. >

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Risk Factors for Offshore-Outsourced Development Projects

The June 2008 CACM contains the article "A Risk Profile of Offshore-Outsourced Development Projects"

Since this is a common profile, I thought I'd reproduce the Top 10 Risks. Some of these are universal across all project profiles ("Lack of top management commitment"), but others are definitely more problematic for offshored …

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Throwing over Flash for Silverlight...Wise?

I have a client who needs a Web-page component that does some photo compositing. Nothing super-fancy, but it needs to be professional, obey some business rules, and do some things dynamically based on static data.

The prototype is in Flash, but is filled with hideous programming -- magic numbers, a big …

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RSS/ATOM Feeds -> Kindle

Daniel Choi has created a Ruby gem that consolidates feeds into a Kindle-readable format! Say aloha to paying \$2 to subscribe to a single blog! link

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Some Aspects of the Midori Story from SD Times

The Midori coverage from SD Times has gone mainstream, even making the front page of BBC World News this morning. Since I reviewed the technical portions of the documents for the story, I thought I might clarify some things. First, though:

  • I have no idea who wrote the document
  • I …
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Crossword App for iPhone Making $2K / day

Via Mike Gunderloy comes this link to the claim that a crossword puzzle app for the iPhone is bringing in the developer \$2K per day.

A forthcoming column of mine observes that while Microsoft is still the absolute king of corporate development, Apple has become increasingly appealing for development of …

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Cobbler's Children

I am aware of the irony that I talk a lot about software quality and the infrastructure of this blog is... well, I think it's up more often than Twitter! ...

But, yes, I'm aware. The cobbler's children go barefoot, and all that...

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"Kids today": Is programming quality going up or going down?

Not only am I as old as dirt, I started programming professionally when I was 16. So this may just be me being crotchety. But I perceive that the average quality of the code in today's software projects is going down.

That doesn't mean that software projects today don't have …

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Hiring Freelance Flash Programmer...

I have a job that is probably about 120 hours total work for a good Flash programmer. By that, I mean I estimate that you could probably do it in about 30 hours, but if you can deliver in 120, everyone is happy.

The only caveat is that you need …

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Wow, are program managers really that conservative?

I know that these little Zoho polls I'm running are totally unscientific, but they are interesting. Only thirteen people have voted on the question "Are corporate SD managers too risk averse or too eager?" but every vote has been "too risk averse."

I'm very surprised by that, because back when …

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