Many long-standing problems like technical debt owe their longevity to two factors — not dealing effectively with their causes and not dealing effectively with their resilience. Because what limits our ability to deal with technical debt might be not be technical, it is useful to explore possible psychological and political sources of the longevity of the technical debt problem.
INTRODUCTION Over the last few years, companies in the music and entertainment industries have repeatedly sued a host of businesses such as Napster, MP3.com, and others for contributory copyright infringement.
Successful application development and maintenance (AD/M) outsourcing relationships are contractually governed by a series of measures that monitor the performance and level of service provided by the outsourcing vendor.
Editor's note: This Executive Update is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of the author's book Best Practices in Software Engineering (McGraw-Hill, forthcoming 2009); Chapter 1 discusses 50 best practices.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in using precise notations such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) to model complex business systems, in particular to model the tidal wave of Internet-drive
RESCUING PROJECTS Projects have problems. Most problems arise and are solved somewhat quickly; on some projects, however, the problems accumulate and are compounded to a point where they cannot be resolved successfully.