How to be Agile when using 3rd party software framework
It can be difficult to be Agile when working with 3rd party software framework. The vendor product may dictate many aspects of the software architecture thwarting your attempts at automated testing and continuous build. However there are steps you can take to make Agile easier. I’ll discuss a few of the options that have worked for [...]
Things I Learnt in 2011
Automation is good. People make or break a project. Thanks Joel. Coding the right tests is hard, but infinitely valuable. “Cutting edge development” describes the processes and principles, not the technologies. Software must be tested in a representative environment. Knowing the gaps between marketing and reality in your vendor’s software is valuable. The timing of a [...]
Dysfunctions of a corporation
Deploying a sufficiently complicated application into a corporate environment involves navigating a sea of paperwork, getting all the appropriate “approvals” in place, co-ordinating with department managers to get time slots from their staff, and so on.
Closing tasks
I read a great quote in I’m feeling lucky. It described a note sent from one Google employee to another as he handed over a piece of software. Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s how it’s running. Here are some things to look at. Here’s what’s going to go wrong if it goes wrong. Here are [...]
Continuous deployment
Automation isn’t about quality, it’s about scale. Manual processes don’t scale. Each part of your process that you automate gets you one step closer to continuous deployment. For many teams, automation is a Quadrant 4 activity – not urgent, not important – but on my teams it is a Quadrant 2 activity – important but [...]