On the destruction of a software team

A couple of posts ago, I tried to describe my experience of how a high performing software team might typically be formed and how the small startup approaches this differently to the larger organisation.  The irony is often that the larger organisation, turning at the speed of a super-tanker, is often desperate to capture the same feel, culture and belonging that small startups have, but without sacrificing their rigid 9-level organisation hierarchy, job roles and pay grades - and therein lies a problem.

On the value of code coverage

I've read lots of interesting articles and blog posts on whether a high unit test code coverage percentage is a good thing to aim for or not.  After some deliberation, my answer (as always) is "it depends."

On the formation of a software team

Software companies are tremendously interesting places to work, and to study the many aspects of how people structure, organise and interact during the execution of complex projects. As a comparatively 'young' industry, it would appear that we are still learning how to build organisations that thrive, and engender within our people the desire to perform at their peak for prolonged periods of time.

On Fitts's Law and "muscle load"

In 1954, a chap called Paul Fitts came up with an equation to express the ease of pointing to or touching an object. In essence, he stated that this metric was a function of the distance to the target and the width of the target.

This is another example where work done more than half a century ago has direct relevance to many of the things we do today - especially in the area of user experience.