Article Roundup - January 10, 2020

Deming’s Rules of Management and Agile Methods
This article lists out W. Edwards Deming’s 14 key principles for transforming business effectiveness and compares and relates them to the Agile Manifesto and other agile methodologies. It’s an interesting read if you’re on an agile team in any sort of leadership role.

Ben Northrop - The Myth of Architect as Chess Master
This is a relatively short article on why you can’t expect a software architect, or someone in that role, to just jump into a problem and fix it in a matter of minutes like some chess grandmaster looking at someone’s game. Sure, it happens, but that is the exception.

How I once saved half a million dollars with a single character code change
Premature optimization is the root of all evil… right? But is it the maxim it’s made out to be? What about micro-optimizations? They just made code harder to read, right? As I frequently say, “It depends”. This article shares an old programmer war story where adding a single 0 into code saved half a million dollars.