Feb

4

I’ve been intending to write an entry (perhaps more than one, don’t know yet) about the various Unified Modeling Language tools out there. At one point, I’d worked with more of these tools than anyone else I knew, and this gave me a bit of perspective on which tool was good for what particular use. Before I did that, I thought that it would be a good idea to do a few posts on the UML itself: what it is, why you care, and how you use it. This post covers the requirements model and diagrams, one of three broad categories of diagrams in the UML, the others being static and dynamic diagrams.

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Jan

31

Iterative Development Challenges the Quality Team

January 31, 2008 | Comments Off on Iterative Development Challenges the Quality Team

Software engineering teams everywhere are moving towards, or have already adopted, an iterative style of development, because it creates a number of desirable effects: better time to market, earlier feedback, easier to manage, to name a few.

But what does this mean to the groups they work with? In this, the last of 4 posts, I look at the challenges to the QA team caused by an iterative style of development, and how you can address them. The first post in this series, Challenges in Iterative Development, gave an overview of this style of development, and some reasons why you’d want to adopt it. The second, Iterative Development Challenges Business Stakeholders, reviewed the challenges faced by the customers of an organization moving to an iterative style. The third, Iterative Development Challenges the Data Team, dealt with challenges in the database organization and how you can address them.

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Jan

29

Iterative Development Challenges the Data Team

January 29, 2008 | Comments Off on Iterative Development Challenges the Data Team

Software engineering teams everywhere are moving towards, or have already adopted, an iterative style of development, because it creates a number of desirable effects: better time to market, earlier feedback, easier to manage, to name a few.

But what does this mean to the groups they work with? In this, the third of 4 posts, I look at the challenges to the data team caused by an iterative style of development, and how you can address them. The first post in this series, Challenges in Iterative Development, gave an overview of this style of development, and some reasons why you’d want to adopt it. The second, Iterative Development Challenges Business Stakeholders, reviewed the challenges faced by the customers of an organization moving to an iterative style. This post covers the data team. Read more

Jan

28

Applying Unix Philosophy

January 28, 2008 | Comments Off on Applying Unix Philosophy

I got rather excited about this feature on Applying Unix Philosophy to Personal Productivity over at LifeHacker. I read ESR’s book, the Art of Unix Programming, a number of years ago (it’s still around here somewhere…), but I’d forgotten most of it. As usual, someone’s done a much better job summing up the points in an easy to understand way than I could have.

I think that as developers, we could do ourselves a service by sticking to these points as we set out to develop software. I’ve got a post coming up in the future about keeping it simple, but this is a nice segway.

Jan

28

Software engineering teams everywhere are moving towards, or have already adopted, an iterative style of development, because it creates a number of desirable effects: better time to market, earlier feedback, easier to manage, to name a few.

But what does this mean to the groups they work with? In this, the second of 4 posts, I look at the challenges to business stakeholders (the customers) caused by an iterative style of development, and how you can address them. The previous post, Challenges in Iterative Development, gave an overview of this style of development, and some reasons why you’d want to adopt it. The next posts will review challenges to the data team, and the quality assurance team. Read more

Jan

26

I was talking with a potential client this past week, and one of the things they asked was about the challenges they would face moving to an iterative style of development. I thought sharing my experience with a wider audience might be a good idea. Many development organizations want to move to an iterative style of development. The current darling child in the field is Scrum, XP, or another form of Agile development, but what does it mean, and why would we want to do it? Read more

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