Industrial Logic Blog

Several decades ago, the software industry was obsessed with counting lines of code per programmer per month. That metric practice famously drove teams to create bloated, defect-ridden software products. After only a few years, the practice was abandoned as detrimental. Sadly, the biases and flaws behind that practice are with us still, influencing our practices […]

Let’s say that I ask you to calculate all the happy prime numbers between Planck’s constant and the speed of light expressed in meters per minute. Did you immediately start reciting numbers to me? Odds are that you did not.

Have you ever seen someone using an older laptop and just felt bad for them? That’s how I feel when I see most people practicing agile these days. We’ve advanced so far beyond where agile was in the mid 1990s, yet so many teams practice agile like it’s 1999! Meanwhile, agile/lean pioneers and practitioners have […]

Foggy brain. Poor circulation. Back trouble. Decreased life expectancy. Yikes. This is your fate if you sit at a desk all day. Have you considered standing while you work? Several hundred thinkers at Facebook prefer to stand for the same reasons that da Vinci, Bonaparte, Churchill, Dickens and Hemingway did: They can think better standing […]

A manager told me that one of his reliable developers seemed to be struggling to maintain focus and wakefulness through the work day. Often we see productivity as a matter of raw effort and motivation. A less enlightened manager may have chided the developer for his lack of energy and attention. The manager may have […]

Selenium (Se) is a useful but dangerous tool. For example, it is extremely useful for cross-browser, multi-page scenario testing.

Tom DeMarco made software analysis and development inherently safer in 1978 when he published his classic, Structured Analysis and System Specification. Even back then, Tom saw how unsafe it was to: shoot once for perfection write giant specifications define behavior via ambiguous language let software maintenance costs soar produce poorly designed code perform insufficient testing

Most agile adoptions show very little success.  Most teams show only a moderate increase in productivity.  Based on my experience and many conversations over the years, I’d say that only 10% of agile development teams actually reach “high performance” where they are achieving 200% to 500% improvements.  We can do much better than that.  And a key step is […]

I’m going to tell you a story that illustrates precisely why paying attention to tech safety is vital for your business and the first step on your road to improving. The other day I experienced an ordering ordeal, a high tech injury that occurs when completing an order is painful, awkward and time-consuming.

Within the last year, I’ve found a new passion, direction and metaphor. I call it tech safety (#techsafety on Twitter). Tech safety leads us to reduce or remove injuries in our high-tech lives. Such injuries aren’t cuts, burns or fatalities.