Usability Deserves Respect Software development is always a gamble, and usability has become part of the table stakes. Ignore usability, and your customers will take their chips and go home.
Data mining, the subject of this month's CBR, aims to recover the ability of our information systems to richly inform our corporate decisionmakers. If we can correctly structure data and then interrogate it intelligently, we potentially can deliver on a longtime promise: to provide a better basis for sound business decisions.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come Software patterns have been helping us design better software for many years. They capture and effectively transmit highly useful knowledge that was once solely in the minds of gurus.
Few IT-related subjects have inspired stronger feelings over the past few years than enterprise resource planning systems, more often known by the acronym ERP. These large, off-the-shelf software packages promised to replace complex legacy problems with a well-integrated and modern application infrastructure. In many ways, this promise was always too grand, and savvy businesspeople should have known better. But the idea that there was a single way of solving so many of your problems proved seductive, leading many companies down the ERP path.
When it comes to software testing, people disagree quite a bit. Some argue vehemently for a particular point of view, while others consider that very position nonsensical. For example, the "zero defects" crowd generally thinks the "good enough quality" crowd is out to lunch -- and vice versa. The different camps have different pictures in their heads, different frames of reference and implicit assumptions. A big part of what's important in debates about software testing (and, by extension, software quality) is what goes unsaid because the speaker considers it obvious.