Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips
Design reviews can be important parts of projects. At design reviews, we attempt to communicate clearly and minimize misunderstandings. There are several design reviews that are important to the success of a project. This essay describes one design review that people want to have but should never be allowed.
We have design reviews In [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
One task which many of us either choose or have thrust upon us is predicting the future. We usually perform this task poorly. An aid to declaring “the future will be thus” is reframing with a few introductory words.
The future will be awful.
There is no way out of this. We are doomed.
We will [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
Just a thought on health insurance from an engineer.
I see that President Obama doesn’t like what existing health insurance companies are doing with their rates and policies. It seems that the president wants health insurance companies to be non-profit and insure everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions.
Health insurance seems to be a pretty simple [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
I experimented with using a wiki to gather and trace requirements. I tried the MediaWiki software. While it works well for building a flow down of requirements, it is not good at placing the individual requirements into a single Word document.
A systems engineering project is looming at work. We don’t have a commercial [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
Engineers create wonderful things now and then. Oblivious users turn the creations upside down and use them backwards. Such oblivious use teaches great lessons that smart organizations use before going to production.
Engineers have their babies. Not the human kind of baby, though some engineers have those, too, but the system-that-they-create kind of baby. [...]

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I have the MoinMoin wiki up and running on a Windows XP machine. I am running a local-only version - no server capability. This was pretty easy and took about 15 minutes.
The source for all this is the MoinMoin site. I downloaded the 1.9 release from their download page. This docs page explains how to [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
Systems builders should concentrate on one thing - improving the work of the people who will use the system.
Sometimes we lose sight of what we are doing. We build systems. Why? Well, to make money for our employer. We hope the system makes money for the organization that uses it. This is about [...]

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