I am a big fan of Fred Brooks, by the way…

ongoing – Build One to Throw Away: “Given that, what hope is there for waterfall development? Or for any approach that doesn’t leave space for going back and building things right once you’ve learned what ‘right’ is by building things once? Well, none.

“…Because there’s this terrible glaring conflict between what sensible managers want and what sensible [developers] know. Managers, good managers, want a plan; they want to lock in design constraints so that work can be dealt out and progress tracked and promises kept. [Developers], good [developers], know that they’re not smart enough to get the core design choices right until they’ve built something that works.

“The various techniques and disciplines gathered around the banner of ‘agile’ are on balance more honest at facing up to this unavoidable tension. But there’s still lots more work to be done.

“And the most important thing is, we all have to remind ourselves, all the time, that we’re not smart enough to get anything important right the first time.”

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Here is an interesting short article at wired.com. It makes an interesting point for us in IT to consider:

“Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.”

That would be a lot easier to swallow.

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Since Penn State has both volume caps and prioritized packets, I am curious what anybody else thinks about this post on the Google Public Policy Blog?

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