Introduction

In 1993 the UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) started offering a part-time, post-graduate course in SQA (software quality assurance).  I had been working as a programmer for ten years but doing this course really opened my eyes to a whole lot of things I was not even aware of.

One of those things was software development methodologies, since one-sixth of the course was devoted to that very subject.  Of course, I had encountered some of the highly detailed waterfall-based methodologies in the past, but the reality was that nobody really used them and all the development I had done (in both small and large organizations) had been a little bit structured (waterfall) but mainly ad-hoc.

This was why I was very interested in the so-called iterative methodologies that were appearing at that time.  Being a team-leader for a small project at the time I actually tried very hard to use Barry Boehm's "spiral methodology", which I believe became the basis (or one of the bases) for IBM's Rational Unified Process (RUP).

Unfortunately, my experiment with methodologies turned out to be disastrous and the project I was working on was cancelled, for which I take full repsonsibility.  The problem was probably more my inexperience than anything but at the time my feeling was that Fred Brooks might have been right when he said there is "no silver bullet".

The Blog

Anyway, a lot has happened since then (in particular, agile methodologies), so I have decided to create this blog on different ideas and experiences I have since had about software development.  (I already have a blog on the development of my freeware/shareware product HexEdit, but there was a lot of stuff that I could not squeeze into that context.)

So, I think this blog will mainly be about development methodologies.  It will probably deviate into other areas of software development like architecture and other aspects of software quality assurance.