This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.In short, software is eating the world.More than 10 years after the pea...

You have wanted to fix that module for ages. Just one look at it and you cringe. The documentation, the weird naming of functions, classes that are just plain weird. The module hobbeles along, but it is just plain dirty. The real programmer in you cringe, and when there finally is some time to refactor the module, you jump at it.Step 1 - Desperation So you start to have a real good look at what you need to. Fix a class here, rename a few functions there, tear out a few functions here. Simple, right? Well, what at first glance seemed like a simple fix, a few tweaks, now envisions itse...

After several years developing software, I have acquired a very a strong opinion on how software should be developed, I actually have come to the conclusion that everything boils down to 10 principles, that if well implemented, will make any software development successful.1.- Customer first.“If we don’t take care of the customer… somebody else will.”Customer first means focusing from a customer perspective on real value for the product being developed, other aspects as: contracts, requirements, technologies… should take a secondary role in the pro...

Lots of questions in the comments to the last two posts. I am not ignoring them. Hopefully many of them will be answered here and in following posts. I am just getting started on this topic.At Google, quality is not equal to test. Yes I am sure that is true elsewhere too. “Quality cannot be tested in” is so cliché it has to be true. From automobiles to software if it isn’t built right in the first place then it is never going to be right. Ask any car company that has ever had to do a mass recall how expensive it is to bolt on quality after-the-fact. However, this is ...