In this short blog, the author summarizes a paper that categorized types of software development waste.

»Civil engineers have solid rules for the way a bridge ought to be constructed: we switch web application frameworks on an annual basis.«

Not only are the capabilities of boring technology well understood, but more importantly, their failure modes, too.

»This book discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data. This aim is not as ambitious as it sounds, because there is not a great deal of data publicly available.«

This article differentiates between process-oriented and commitment-oriented projects and their imposter equivalents.

The author encourages the completeness concept in software and emphasizes the advantages of focusing on stability and reliability instead of adding new features.

The author shares six ideas after working in the software industry for 45 years.

First, Understand the Problem.

Key Takeaways:

• Complexity is the greatest impediment to a software company’s growth and profitability.
• Development costs increase exponentially with respect to the complexity of your code base.
• The choice between speed and simplicity is a false dichotomy. Investment in simplicity is investment in speed.
• Few executives recognize the cost of complexity because they don’t understand the nature of the products they’re selling.
• Software is a product like no other — a hybrid product-service with a very unique warranty.

My takeaway from these stories is this: Once you’ve learned enough that there’s a certain distance between the current version of your product and the best version of that product you can imagine, then the right approach is not to replace your software with a new version, but to build something new next to it — without throwing away what you have.

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• Soviet Gas Pipeline Explosion
• Bitcoin Hack, Mt. Gox
• Heathrow Terminal 5 Opening
• The Mariner 1 Spacecraft
• The Morris Worm
• Pentium FDIV bug
• Knight's $440 Million Error
• Honourable mention: NOAA-19 Satellite