Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are often attentive to and focused on different levels of conceptual refinement. These perspectives vary according to their roles on a project, their individual personalities, and their experience. I have tended to mentally categorize these individuals into one of two different types of individuals at the top and bottom of this granularity perception universe: a "Roughly right" personality type, and a "Precisely right" type. Read more »

The leadership and team members on development projects often use language whose meaning is ambiguous. Unraveling the possibilities underneath their different concepts can be quite challenging. But if you don't confront and solve those challenges, it can cause considerably more pain later, as these misunderstandings must eventually be reconciled. 

Success in development endeavors relies upon effective communications. Such communications involves developing and agreeing on a common, foundational understanding of the underlying key concepts that are threaded through such projects. Achieving such understanding usually requires careful listening, disciplined and coherent integration, and reconciliation of the ideas being expressed by different stakeholders over time. It also requires clear and thorough probing into the implications behind their emerging meaning(s) and reasoning(s), in multiple situations, and under different scenarios.  Read more »

This is how I spent over half my weekends and evenings from early April until early October, 2007, trying to get Vista to work as advertised. I had decided to upgrade to Vista in late February, shortly after it was formally released after a long and difficult series of public betas.

I didn't enter this decision lightly; although I was migrating to Vista for the capabilities that they were marketting - improved security and performance, and its digital media handling features for music, video, and photos - I knew such releases usually have some problems. Despite this, I was expecting the new Windows Media Center features to be reasonably mature, since this was effectively their third generation release and a key part of their strategy to place Microsoft software into the middle of home entertainment systems, a potentially huge growth market. Read more »

I've been working for the past few weeks on several features of this web site that I felt were important:

• The capability to aggregate RSS data from partner blogs and provide it on various views
• The capability to provide visibility of content which is still under development when desired
• The capability to subscribe to content and get email notification when it has changed

Such statements can form the start of functional requirements, but for me on this site, as in so many other situations, it's often first more fruitful to explore what's possible through prototyping and experimentation, before spending too much time trying to get the lower-level requirements right. This is particularly the case when the technologies you choose to use are unfamilar, evolving, or immature. In the case of the above capabilities, some required support from other open-source authors, some required changes on my web site host, and some were able to be done locally.  Read more »