Decomposing to Attack Complexity
Our first post in a series on decomposition introduced the importance of breaking things down throughout the process of delivering software. Let’s continue this series by looking at more concrete examples of decomposition to attack software architecture and software complexity. What is Software Complexity? Herbert Simon once said, “Complexity comes from a large number of […]
Top 10 Reasons I Love Doing Software Quality Assurance
Software Quality Assurance, Why I love it: #10 I love quality assurance because every bug I find is one that was not found by the customer. #9 There is always more to learn about testing techniques and tools. #8 Being part of a team that delivers a quality product gives me great pride. #7 Running […]
It’s Not Just About Process
Agile software practitioners focus a lot of attention on people, communication, collaboration, and strong values. In many environments, these are unquestionably the best opportunities for improvement. Inevitably, though, all software development teams reach a point where their greatest opportunity for improving the way they implement and deliver a product are of a technical nature. There is […]
Why Decomposition Matters
As children, we were told by adults to take smaller bites when eating. We didn’t always understand the risk of choking that they saw, but ultimately it was easier and safer to chew those smaller bites. In some cases, taking smaller bites made the difference in finishing more of the meal. But have we translated […]
Qualities of a Good Team Player
The word “team” in Agile Team is hugely important and something we rarely give much thought to. I recently browsed the web to discover and define what really makes a good team player. Part of my personal journey is to improve as a member of my team. I look to these words for inspiration. Coming […]
Austin DevOps Events Summary – Culture is Important
Last week some of our team attended several DevOps Austin related events. We had a great time learning and interacting with other technologists attending both PuppetCamp Austin and DevOps Days Austin. This edition of the annual DevOps Days event in Austin (which also takes place in other cities each year) was declared the biggest. […]
Is Hadoop the right solution?
I noticed some interesting announcements recently concerning the open-source Apache project Hadoop. Firstly, in the last week, both Intel and EMC have announced their own distributions (link). It seems that the big iron hardware vendors are finally coming around to seeing Hadoop as the standard for big data processing. It makes sense for these vendors […]
Podcast Recommendation: The Ruby Rogues
WAIT! Stop Right There!!! I know some of you saw Ruby in the title and are about to move on, but I encourage you to read on. This could be beneficial to you even if you don’t know or don’t care about the Ruby programming language. Podcast Description For those of you who listen to […]
Write Software That Behaves!
Behavior Driven Development Behavior Driven Development is the process of writing high-level scenarios verifying a User Story meets the Acceptance Criteria and the expectations of the stakeholders. The automation behind the scenarios is written to initially fail and then pass once the User Story development is complete. BDD is largely a collaboration tool which forces […]
The Lean Startup Book Review
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is without a doubt one of the better entrepreneurial books I have read. The book claims to explain “how today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses.” The author’s writing is easy to follow, and he uses a lot of real-life examples to help drive his points. […]