Tag: structural quality

Last fall, Gartner’s Andy Kyte issued a wake-up call about technical debt that was akin to a piano being dropped on the head of the IT industry. In estimating that technical debt – the cost to fix the structural quality problems in an application that, if left unfixed, put the business at serious risk – has already reached $500 billion globally and is fast on its way to exceeding $1 trillion by 2015, Kyte stirred up a hornet's nest of activity around the topic.

The rate at which security issues have plagued businesses lately is staggering. Every week we hear of multiple vulnerabilities, millions of personal data records being exposed and corporations watching profits dwindle as reparation costs for these breaches extend into millions and even billions of dollars.

Human beings are an odd animal. We’re the only animal that experiences embarrassment over mistakes; some say we’re the only animal that realizes we make them. We also run a full gamut of emotions when we make mistakes – from frustration and self-deprecation to humor and acceptance.

I’ve written quite a bit about the spate of businesses that have suffered some form of disruption over the last few months – security breaches at Sony, Android malware attacks, system outages at the London Stock Exchange, operational system failures on London’s East Coast Line and numerous others. All these cases have had one thing in common: they all have had software structural issues as their root causes.

From the earthquake and tsunami in Japan back in March to the tornadoes that have ripped through the Midwestern United States over the last two months, we have been witness to the violence and destruction Mother Nature can inflict without warning.

As we begin to move on from the shock of the destruction wrought by these natural disasters, we turn our attention to the recovery, both in human terms and in terms of business.

The hits keep coming for Sony. Unfortunately for the music label and technology icon, though, its latest hits aren’t the ones that chart on Billboard, but rather the kind that cost it money and give the company a black eye in the media.

In the Bible, when Moses returns to Mount Sinai after smashing the Ten Commandments, God says to him, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Happy Birthday to Agile Development! You’re 10 years old now; that’s an important age. A lot of things start happening at age 10. The pre-teen years start and things will seem to get awkward. Most important, a lot more will be expected of you.

There once was a time when "settlers" were a hearty bunch. They were determined, adventurous folks who risked all to head out from their homes in the East to grab a piece of the unknown in the West on the premise of “what might be.”

It’s nearly impossible these days to pick up a trade publication covering the tech industry without reading something about cloud computing. The plethora of coverage is enough to make one think that cloud computing is the latest technological panacea, good for everything from live data storage to data archiving and all enterprise needs in between.

Whether it’s in sports, medicine, music or even a military operation, I’m a firm believer in the “best man for the job” concept. This is why Agile, or more specifically, Scrum development, sounds to me like a smart play for an organization.

Let me start by saying that RSA is a name I generally equate with security of enterprise systems. That belief made it even more surprising a few weeks ago when I read that the security giant had been the victim of a cyber attack.