Well, this has been a busy week. Today, I finished day four of a four day course on The Open Group Architecture Forum (TOGAF)’s v9.1 Level 1 & 2 Enterprise Architecture certification. The course has given me a very decent foundation of learning from which to build upon, and hopefully […]
Process Methodology
13 posts
If you’ve spent any amount of time in the IT industry – and particularly in software development – you’ve probably been asked to forecast the effort associated with some kind of work, outcome or deliverable. Software development is tricky as it involves some degree of guess work – requirements can […]
If you’ve ever had any involvement with an Agile project (whether it was “pure” Agile or not), you’ll likely have encountered the beast which is effort forecasting and analysis. This drives the initial estimate of the amount of work which your team thinks it can deliver within a given period. […]
To some an ‘Agile’ project means delivering value to a client or business more frequently than with other methodologies. This can be achieved, with the right people, the right sponsorship within the right organisation which is open to the concept. Other times, trying to run a successful Agile project will […]
Earlier this month some very useful guidance documentation was published on Codeplex. The topic? Build and versioning guidance, from Microsoft’s ALM Rangers group. The guides are broken down into a number of PDF files. In the main documentation archive (which you can download from Codeplex) are a number of files: […]
Introduction Recently I had to determine a universal product versioning syntax for our products and services. This was done to ensure a level of consistency between projects and products. Depending on the deployment, currently there has been a wildly different format used between products and services. Given the recent adoption […]
There is a very good blog entry located here which lists questions every development team and team leads should ask themselves during development cycles. From the article: Whole team What can we automate? where are we "Reinventing the wheel"? what are the tools that slow us down? what tools can […]
It’s always interesting to observe a couple of strong ideologues debate philosophic tenets in the public limelight. Especially when it relates to development process methodology. Whether this particular series of incidents merits much attention is anyone’s guess. However, if you hold (1) The Joel Test in any regard (and you […]
Mitch Denny recently passed this link around an internal tech list. Now, as developers (or software engineers) we do have some odd eccentricities. We typically work in far different environments to the contrast of many traditional industries/work environments, and the challenges of day to day life seem to be somewhat […]
We moved into a new house on Wednesday and, as usual, we have boxes galore spread throughout the house. The consequence of this is pretty obvious: no (decent) internet, no phone line, no desk and no office. For someone who predominantly works from home, this is as close to […]
G’day. So yesterday I tore out some more hair trying to duel with Subversion (SVN). I’m not using the Ankh Visual Studio plugin (as yet). What ended up happening was that somehow SVN got the idea that I wanted to delete a Web.config file. Somehow it got committed, and […]
At the recent architect forum in Sydney I was able to sit in on a round table discussion regarding rapid estimation exercises. I’m in no way new to the process of estimating implementation time or generating effort forecasts – I’ve done so professionally for the past eight or nine years, an […]
G’day. Today’s topic is around the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) process methodology and how it relates to the process of gathering requirements and effort forecasting. Yes, this is going to be one of those heavy blog entries. The proper and right way to get to forecasting effort and […]