Category Archives: Uncategorized

On the SEI blog I write about some of our experience at Nedbank. There are two broad categories of challenges associated with scaling process change in general or TSP in particular to larger organizations: 1) The logistics of rollout and … Continue reading →

My contribution to the SEI technical blog describes what I’ve been up to in Africa. I wrote about a experience with a development team at a bank in Johannesburg. http://blog.sei.cmu.edu/post.cfm/nedbank-uses-tsp-to-improve-financial-systems Check out the video where the developers describe their experience … Continue reading →

My article in Software Quality Professional just came out. http://asq.org/software-quality/2012/03/software-quality/plan-for-success.pdf It is available for download if you register. The content is technical, and includes a model I built, but the message is simple. To succeed in software development, plan for … Continue reading →

Science advances one funeral at a time. Max Planck, early 20th century physicist A more literal translation might have been “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because … Continue reading →

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. Translation: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. -Blaise Pascal Writing a good … Continue reading →

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do” – Watts Humphrey “Would you tell me which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get,” said … Continue reading →

Process improvement is usually gradual, a series of small improvements that add up to a large improvement. James Watt’s breakthrough innovation of the steam engine doubled the efficiency of the suddenly obsolete Newcomen engine. But subsequent incremental improvements quadrupled the … Continue reading →

I came across a very problematic example of addressing a software development problem using the theory of constraints at http://www.agiledesign.co.uk/2010/theory-of-constraints-for-beginners So, an example of applying these steps in a software development context might be; Our goal is to construct, test … Continue reading →

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316387539&sr=8-1 If you were disappointed with “Blink”, this promises to be the book that tells you when to think fast and when to take it slow.