Johnathon

Wright

My favorite quote from the AltDotNet conference in Austin: --- "All you've got to do is write the documentation that distracts the SOX guys and you're good." --- I have no problems with documentation. My problem is with people who assume that if some documentation is good, lots of documentation is better.

What an embarassment. !http://bp1.blogger.com/_VeJd3vmTCZg/R2kz0GpS6uI/AAAAAAAAEhc/HoLxuK_1hkE/s320/excel_pathetic.png! It was recently pointed out to me that, by default, Excel 2007 will not let you open two files with the same name that are stored in different folders. Take these two files for...

I'm working on a blog entry, or a speech for Shreveport Toastmasters, or whatever. I remember reading an interesting web page about this-that-or-the-other, and I can't find it. That's weird, because I bookmark every interesting website I find, so I can find it again. Or, if I don't have time to read it but it looks interesting, I bookmark it....

Abstractly speaking, what makes a group agile? You can get a list of practices from various XP sites. I'm looking beyond the patterns and practices. If you look at the core of agile, why did these practices come about? While thinking about this, I went down the proof-by-contradiction path. How can you prove that a group is not agile? What are...

I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a software project successful. Some of my co-workers at Praeses are fond of discussing the struggles of a certain Ruby project. Since it is certainly a struggling project, and since most projects at Praeses are done in C#, the culprit, the reason for the problems, must be Ruby. Obviously this is a...

Everyone who has been involved in a large-scale development project, or has any kind of life, inherently knows about Domain specific languages. I knew about them. But until someone pointed out to me that they existed, I hadn't thought specifically about them . So, I was excited to hear it being talked about at the Alt.NET conference, because I...

This is a continuation of the "user stories":http://blog.mustmodify.com/2007/10/user-stories.html post. User Story Cards User Story Cards are created during meetings of the stakeholders to create the specifications for a program. Picking a specific Episode, we ask stakeholders to describe the users' experience in that episode. Each user...

About a year ago, I was tasked with creating a help system. I sat down, ready to pour out my astounding wit into a document that would enable users to achieve the path to enlightenment. Unfortunately, I came to as realization. I realized that I didn't know what the end users would want to know. After talking to some other developers and...