Category: Practice
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Ethical Basis of Good Design Practice
Building a trustworthy system that effectively protects the confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of its data to meet information security requirements is mainly the purview of the developers. However, stakeholders (especially Subject Matter Experts, or “SMEs”) have an ethical responsibility as well. It’s quite possible for the SMEs to affect trustworthiness by placing constraints on the user experience ( UX) design contrary to good design practice. These constraints can adversely affect system integrity, degrading system trustworthiness. Furthermore, the rationale driving the constraint may be unethical from a business (and not technical) perspective.
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The Zombie Project
It’s a week before halloween and I’m getting prepared for the neighborhood beasties and ghosties and their insatiable appetites for tooth-decaying treats. Several years ago, my wife did something different and bought a case of microwave popcorn packages for me to distribute to the spectral beggars. I was expecting insults and the odd raw egg […]
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Time Travel and Software Testing
Time travel is the stuff of science fiction. But you can simulate time travel for testing your’s system’s ability to process events occurring at any time.
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Of Carts, Horses and Hurricanes
Thoughts on project scheduling, agile projects, budget estimates, and similarities with carts, horses, and hurricanes.
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How to Build a Business Case
Introduction Most information technology (IT) project management literature focuses on managing software acquisition projects. This article is different because it describes how to plan a business case development project – how to do the “due diligence” before deciding if and how to acquire a new system. The insights in this article should be a valuable […]
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Pilot Testing a New Business System
Over the years I heard a lot of questions about pilot testing a new IT system. I’ve also seen project teams use pilot testing as a way to buffer their project schedules. This article describes this important activity.
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How Jargon Can Affect System Design
In this article I discuss how over-reliance on jargon can lead to problematic design decisions. As an example, I’ll use the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) modernization project. Problems with Jargon A jargon is a set of words and expressions used by a group of people (a community) that’s […]
Practical IT Projects 