Dear readers,

I wish you happy, joyful and prosperous New Year! I sincerely wish and hope that in the New Year all your software projects will be in excellent shape, your customers will be very satisfied and you will feel as a happy, inspired and successful Software Creator the whole year!

2007 is the first year of this blog. And I still have to learn a lot to make the blog better and really useful for you. I want to highlight few articles that I believe were most interesting this year:

• Programmers are lazy capricious pseudo-intellectuals. Really? – why some management consultants could think that programmers are sloppy, disorganized and have hyper-inflated self-importance.
• How to Be Happy At Work. Short tutorial. – most jobs are not created to make us happy – what can we do ourselves to be happy at work?
• What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team? – review of four major leadership styles for software teams with pros and cons
• Do We Need Software Architects? 10 Reasons Why Not – 10 reasons why we don’t need non-programming decision-making software architects
• Evolutionary Software Architecture or Why Developers Are Not Janitors – what is effective architecture and overview of complex self-organized systems in this context
• Guide to Job Security for Software Developers: 15 Sure-Fire Methods – few strategies how to cope with job security – some are controversial 🙂
• Can Computers Beat Human Programmers? – 5 posts discuss if computers could replace human programmers
• Software Development is The Flow of Ideas. The Rest is Secondary – idea flow is one of the most important aspect of the software development
• The Mind of the Programmer. Anatomy and 3 Contradictions – uncovering contradictory biological mechanism behind human (and programmers) mind
• Software Requirements Are Elusive: 6 Reasons Why Customers Cannot Get Them Right – 6 psychological reasons why customers cannot predict what they will need from the software in the future
• Lost Personalities: How our company alters us – investigation how other people change our minds and make us behave differently

I write about everything what is interesting for me and can help to understand better people, systems and software development in overall. But certainly, it is not enough to make this blog interesting for you without your feedback. I want to take the opportunity to ask three questions:

• What did you like and find interesting in this blog?
• How can I make it better?
• What do you want to see here in the new year?

Thank you for your interest, patience and participation. Have great holidays and the rest of year!

We can consider software development as the translation of our theories, concepts and ideas into the machine code. Therefore, how we gain, evolve and verify this knowledge is very important for building successful software. There are two main views how we gain the knowledge: Rationalism and Empiricism.

Rationalists appeal to reason as a source of knowledge or justification. They claim that our concepts and knowledge are gained a priori, independently of experience. Empiricists claim that experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge. Rationalists come up with a theory and look for the evidence to support it. Empiricists assembles evidence, and builds on the evidence to form a theory.

The main question for the both camps: How do we know that our theory is true knowledge and not a guess?

Rationalism and empiricism have various success in different areas:

• Mathematics is triumph of rationalists – all the complex branches and theories are deducted logically from few intuitive basic premises.
• Natural sciences, which are dealing with dynamic complex systems combine rationalism and empiricism using scientific method: empirical observations and experiments with rational hypotheses and predictions. However, empiricism has the main emphasis – observational experiments are necessary to understand the physical universe.
• Social sciences, politics, economics show inability to come up with reliable rational theories. However, empiricism in these areas has own limitations as it is difficult to make comprehensive social experiments and deduct from them (and history) any true knowledge and theory about human groups and their societies. Human groups are complex, unpredictable and often irrational systems. They don’t behave consistently and don’t submit to permanent laws as physical world does.

What view does work better for software development?

How do these views show up in software development? Pure rationalists would prefer developing complete concepts and knowledge behind the software system using intuition, logic and creative insights before start of programming. Pure empiricists would immediately dive into experiments, programming and getting early practical results and build their knowledge based on this experience.

Read full post >>

Wired magazine published a very interesting article about change in US military philosophy during the Iraq war. US started with idea of Network-Centric Warfare:

The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies.

The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers.

Advanced technology helped to achieve quick victories – the opposing forces in Iraq (and Afghanistan) were broken in matter of days. But years of struggle to establish the new order came after these victories. Seizing territory and destroying enemy forces was not enough for the success. American military have learned from these failures and started to change approach recently. They realized importance of winning trust, minds and hearts of local people to win the war.

General David Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force in Iraq, knows all about these mind games. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, “an operational code’ that is valid for an entire group of people.” And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. “If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents,” it says.

Sometimes software development projects are closer to military operations than to the engineering process. The situation often changes, pressure is building up and quick decisions are required. The software system is the end result of these operations and developers are in the forefront. The software system campaign is not finished after the initial development is over: people start using the system, administrators support it and developers continue evolving it over time.

What skills can developers learn to contribute to the overall success of the long software campaign beside coming with technical solutions?

We often rely on technology, new tools and smart strategies to win our software battles. But at the end, people will decide the fate of the software. Should we teach programmers how to win minds of people who use their software in addition to mastering superiority in technology solutions?