“You want it when?” you ask yourself while attempting to suppress your inner urge to shout.  It’s the reflexive question that wells up inside as the sales and marketing team demands another impossible release date for your next project.   As you walk back to your cubicle after the meeting, you become overwhelmed with a sense of gloom and foreboding.   “Not again!” you exclaim.  “Don’t we ever learn?” you ask yourself as if you expected a different answer after hearing “No” one hundred times before.  It’s like being a character in an Adam Sandler movie titled, “101 First Projects.”

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are practices that work and put you back in control of your software projects.  First, we need to acknowledge that we, in the software organization, are predominantly to blame for the circumstances we find ourselves in.  We’ve been playing the game all wrong when we play the role of the Victim.  We’ve contributed to the repetitive cycle by doing the same thing over-and-over again as if things will finally be different.   We’ve chosen to work incredible amounts of overtime instead of investing in change and new practices that make us more productive and more predictable.  We’ve been close-minded behaving like religious cult figures when new ideas challenge our conventional thinking.

My purpose in creating this blog is to share with you my 20+ years of experience developing and managing software projects for some of the largest and well-know global corporations.  I hope to be provocative and shatter the conventional group think that holds our projects back – making many of us wonder why we chose a career in application development in the first place (If I only knew in college what I know now, things would be different).  While many of the problems have easy answers, they require effort and change in thinking to realize their benefits.

It is my hope that this will be an interactive blog where you, the readers, share your critical opinions and experiences.  Together, let’s advance the state of the art in the practice of application development.