Is this the reason why Apple does not provide Java 6 for Mac OS X Leopard? A Java 6 open source port is coming! Until now, I did not have time to try it. The description on the website says that the UI components are for use with X11. On the Mac, X11 is available but less cool than the Aqua UI. If I had to write a Java-based client-side UI with this toolkit, I’d try to omit Swing and X11 and use cocoa-based SWT from Eclipse, instead. Maybe, on a long winter evening…
Verfasst von admin unter Soft skills
Can you define the word “confusion”? For me, it simply means that somebody is trying to do two (or more) different things at the same time.
Example: You work as an architect in a software project. Customers bombard you with new requirements every day. You have series of meetings with different groups of them in the same project, each meeting series has a different subject and of course, each group of customers to whom you talk thinks that their particular subject is the most important and urgent in the project.
When you walk into too many such meetings without thinking about it, your state of mind could more and more easily be described by “confusion”. (You will say: “OK, Matthias, everybody else knows that but: what should an architect do in that situation?”). More >
Verfasst von admin unter Soft skills
In recent projects, I encounter increasingly heterogeneous development teams. Some develop here, some next door, some in another city, some across the world in India. Sometimes, I watch one of those teams when they meet people from another team for the first time. In that kind of situation, they almost always question what the other team is doing, very often with little respect for the results the other team has achieved so far. You can really feel the borders between people in those situations.
Why is that so? More >
Verfasst von admin unter Gefunden
Mark Masterson reasoned in his recent blog entry about why it is possible for a customer to change requirements so often, even fundamental ones that change the whole software development solution. He answers:
The physical laws of the universe constrain a customer, requesting the design and construction of a physical object, from changing their mind about the scope very often, and they can almost never make fundamental changes (“Oh, but we want the skyscraper to have 20 more floors”) downstream. The physical laws of the universe get in the way. Software is thoughtstuff. Those same physical laws do not apply (at least not in the same way or to the same degree). Customers can, and do, change their minds on a near constant basis, including changes in the fundamental nature of the thing under construction.
This is a really important thought, from my point of view. There is no such thing as an “unchangeable requirement”, it is always only a question of the required effort and the completion date of the implementation. So, as a member of a software development organization, be prepared to throw away code and let your customer find out what she really wants.
Thanks, Mark, for pointing that out.
