What’s In Your Attic?
One of my favourite books is Steinbeck’s “The Winter of our Discontent”. In it, he writes “So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.” I love this sentiment. It can be applied at a personal level, organizational level, institutional / societal level or at almost any abstraction one cares to apply it to. These lovelies in the attic could be ways of doing...
Read MoreData Driven Projects
From the dawn of programming time, one of the holy grails that programmers have chased is to avoid hard-coding data values into program code if at all possible. Since most significant applications use some form of database management system, software applications can be developed that are extremely flexible because their behaviour can be changed by manipulating the underlying data, rather than program code. Over the past ten years, I have worked on a ton of projects where application changes...
Read MoreAgile vs Waterfall Comparison
Here’s a very good comparison of traditional software development processes (ie. waterfall) with some newer alternatives (agile and scrum). It is interesting that the author treats agile and scrum as distinct alternatives when many scrum practicioners would suggest scrum is simply an agile approach. In any case, the author’s comparison resonated with me because of how we compared these approaches against each other using a lengthy list of project attributes, all of which are things that the...
Read MoreSome Thoughts on Agile
Here’s some insight I have gleaned from delving into Agile over last little while. While these points might seem overly simplistic, they are key concepts from my perspective: Agile is an umbrella term that describes approaches for software development that are quite different from the waterfall approach, which is very linear in concept, that is quite prevalent in many shops Scrum and XP (eXtreme Programming) are two approaches that are considered Agile Some of the folks whose stuff...
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