The ambiguity of real work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professor Donald...
View ArticleSoftware engineering in-the-large: the coordination challenge
Back when I was an engineering student, I wanted to know “How do the big companies develop software? How does it happen in the real world?” Now that I work at a company that has to do large-scale...
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Bad Religion: A review of Work Pray Code
When I worked as a professor at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, after being there for a few months, during a conversation with the chair of the computer science department he asked me “have you...
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Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?
Recently I gave a guest lecture in a graduate level software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. This post is a sort of rough transcript of my talk. I...
View ArticleIncident categories I’d like to see
If you’re categorizing your incidents by cause, here are some options for causes that I’d love to see used. These are all taken directly from the field of cognitive systems engineering research....
View ArticleMaking peace with the imperfect nature of mental models
We all carry with us in our heads models about how the world works, which we colloquially refer to as mental models. These models are always incomplete, often stale, and sometimes they’re just plain...
View ArticleWhen there’s no gemba to go to
I’m finally trying to read through some Toyota-related books to get a better understanding of the lean movement. Not too long ago, I read Sheigo Shingo’s Non-Stock Production: The Shingo System of...
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