My Personal Vision Of Hell
Here it is. Weekly 90 minute meetings on the design of the shutdown menu for Vista. Actually, the article is a really fascinating look inside Microsoft, from the perspective of the Windows Vista Shutdown menu. The comments on the post are really fascinating as well.
I've been re-reading The Mythical Man Month in bits and pieces. I first read it in 1996, 2.5 years out of college, and while it all seemed to make sense, it didn't really resonate. Now, ten years later, I'm convinced that Fred Brooks is a genius. Not perfect - there's a number of things that I disagreed with in No Silver Bullet, for example. But in the end, Brooks is probably the sharpest commentator on this profession, ever. Reading Brooks, I was struck by how many of the things he was writing 20, 30 years ago are now part of the "agile philosophy" - you know, that radical new methodology thingy that everybody's raving about. Look again at No Silver Bullet, under the section "Promising Attacks on the Conceptual Essence": two of his 4 main points are "Requirements refinement and rapid prototyping" and "Incremental development - grow, not build, software". That was written 20 years ago and these are still not commonly practiced.