When Craig Smith and I were planning our presentation for Agile 2011 – we toyed with the idea of listing 7 anti-patterns for automated testing. I’ve taken these patterns and loosely matched them to the classic seven-deadly-sins. This metaphor also allowed me to include a linocut that my uncle Errol Smith made – pictured here. Senior management often [...]
Craig Smith and I presented a session called Accelerating the Speed To Cool On The Road To Building Quality In at Agile2011 in Salt Lake City. The talk was based around work that we have been doing at Suncorp to improve testing capability, skills and approaches. We also included some of the work we’ve done [...]
Startup businesses face significant risk in the search for a sustainable, profitable and scalable business model. Consequently, the success rate for Startups is low, making them a typically high risk investment. Agile methods offer a way of reducing the risk for both the technical implementation and the development of customers. This is achieved by increasing [...]
I presented a session at the Brisbane Agile Academy Meetup group on Agile for Startups. I discussed some of the Agile principles and practices relevant to a startup and demonstrated some of the tools used by Ennova. Despite numerous technical issues (which rendered the video unusable) the content stimulated heaps of questions. Craig Smith and [...]
Gregory Wilson published an article in the American Scientist discussing the results from a web-based survey of how scientists use computers. Its worth a reading as it highlights the differences between the the scientific community and the IT industry. For me, the most important were collaboration, team work and reuse.
In many organisations (especially larger commercial or government) it is common for the project governance processes to require an estimate of project costs before funds can be released and the project launched. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an estimate that can be used as the basis of a go/no-go decision. In the example discussed [...]
Before I started work on a recent project, I was asked if Agile methods could be applied to a systems integration project. Naturally I said yes, (responding more from instinct rather than first hand knowledge) – but as soon as I got a chance I typed ‘agile‘ and ‘systems integration‘ into the Google search bar. [...]
Dave Cooper of Genworks published an AIAA paper where he defines the minimum set of features for a Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) system. These features include: Functional Coding Style: programs return values, rather than modifying things in memory or in the model. Declarative Coding Style: there is no “begin” or “end” to a KBE model – [...]
The launch of Google’s Chrome browser has triggered media hype around cloud computing issues. The ABC’s Background Briefing has a very entertaining podcast and the show page has some great links for further information. My favorite is the song about life down on the Server Farm.
This image is an interesting picture I found on Brian Solis’ Blog that groups social media web sites in terms of the forum they provide for sharing information, ideas and conversations.