or is software development a paradise for fools? — “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.” ― Winston S. Churchill Software development can feel like a group of intelligent people doing foolish things. The plans, reports, and activities around creating software seem to hinder as much as they help. Software development failure…

Stupid development is as stupid development does — We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein Software projects are nests of idiotic behaviour. Developers like to think of themselves as rational people surrounded by crazy people. It's easy to go slightly crazy when you work in…

Thank Petrov we avoided nuclear war — ‘’I knew perfectly well that nobody would be able to correct my mistake if I had made one’’ Stanislav Petrov On 26th September 1983, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov averted nuclear war by questioning what seemed to be a nuclear attack and deciding it was a false alarm. This is a great…

Humility is how developers avoid being wrong — “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.” Eric S. Raymond Overconfident developers don’t understand the limits of their expertise and knowledge. This creates dangerous blind spots where ignorance replaces expertise. Humble developers use the development team to highlight when they are…

Set high expectations of yourself but never of the development team — If you want a happy life as a developer, avoid large projects, agile projects, and particularly large agile projects. Salespeople, managers, and customers will become so excited about the benefits of creating software they will tell everyone who will listen it will automate everything and make everyone who uses it…

Green status updates, hide the red problems — You only learn from the mistakes you acknowledge you made Software development suffers from watermelon reporting. Green status updates which optimistically say everything is good but hide the red middle. Telling projects what they want to hear is not what they need to hear. Optimistic progress reports hide problems and…

Don’t sacrifice your time for free — Problems can’t be outworked, they wait until you get tired and pop up again The common solution to missed deadlines is for the development team to work harder, work more hours. When the solution is developers working more than their 8 hours, it's a warning the problem isn’t being fixed…

Some people have to get burnt to know the cooker is hot — I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Confucius All developers are clever and can write code, but it’s the wise developers who can create software efficiently by avoiding problems, reducing technical debt and not making the same mistakes twice. …

What worked in the past might not work in the future — Software development teams are always prepared to create software in the same way as the last project. There is no magic formula when creating software, no approach that works every time. You must adapt your approach to be most effective in your project. There is no one size fits all…