A mailing list recently reminded me of the so-called “Peter principle”, which avers rather sarcastically that in terms of careers, everyone rises to the level of his incompetence. While I was trying to figure out whether this makes any sense, I realised that there’s a huge assumption built into the principle: Good is up. Somehow,… [Read more…]
July 15, 2007
Last week a metaphor nearly fooled me into buying a household appliance I don’t need. Let me explain… For historical reasons I do most of the ironing in our household, and recently the steam-iron had been causing me problems by overheating. It seemed to be getting gradually worse, to the point that I was increasingly… [Read more…]
June 25, 2007
Almost a year ago InfoQ carried an interview with Jim Johnson of the Standish Group, in which Jim used a term I hadn’t heard before: “InfoQ: Agile must bring in new issues: how do you say when “planned” scope is accomplished, for a project using adaptive planning? JJ: That’s a good question. With companies like… [Read more…]
May 21, 2007
A couple of weeks ago I discovered I had missed dozens of smells in a piece of code I thought I knew well. And today I discovered yet another smell in the same code, this time a really big one. What’s wrong with me? I have a bunch of code, code that I wrote a… [Read more…]
May 1, 2006
Some metaphorical terms - such as the names of the GoF design patterns - are so deeply ingrained in our daily work that we get a small shock when we're reminded of the term's origins
November 28, 2005
In which I explore the impact of metaphor on system architecture
October 9, 2005
Being a link to a bibliography composed by Brian Marick
I'm Kevin Rutherford, from Macclesfield in the UK. I'm an independent agile software coach and mentor, specialising in test-driven development, agile, lean and the theory of constraints.
June 22, 2008
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