The easiest way to save money and time building software products is to only build things that are absolutely essential. More features and frameworks means more code to write, more code to test and more code to go wrong. The… Read More
Using Hoshin Kanri to Become a Lean Enterprise
Achieving strategic business goals in a constantly changing environment is often compared with steering a ship through a storm. Heading in the best overall direction is important while at the same time reacting to the the weather and each breaking… Read More
Developing HTML Forms
Developing useful and professional HTML forms requires a lot more work than simple examples might suggest. There are a whole range of problems such as handling initial data, client-side validation, server-side validation, optimistic concurrency and performing the final action. This… Read More
Ideas on How to Split User Stories
Breaking large user stories (or work items in layman’s terms) down into several smaller ones hugely improves delivery predictability. There are several reasons for this including the fact that smaller items with fewer moving parts are simply easier to estimate… Read More
TDD or Test Driven Development Explained
TDD or Test Driven Development is something that’s easy to talk about but harder to do and a lot harder to do well and get value from. Done with good judgement TDD can help produce excellent quality code that is… Read More
Quick and Dirty Swap File (Linux)
Need a swap file on a Virtual Machine that didn’t come with one? Don’t care about the size, name or location? This is for you… I use lots of tiny virtual servers for development and testing and on most hosting… Read More
Shrink QEMU/QCOW2 Images
Needed to shrink a full directory of QEMU QCOW2 images today that had grown over time with snapshots and general use. While there is information around on the web about it, the focus is on single images and the code… Read More
Conway’s Law Explored and Explained
Conway’s Law was observed by Met Conway and made famous in Fred Brooks’ 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. It states – “Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure”. … Read More
Delivering Value in Software Projects
Features in business software typically make things quicker and less costly to do or sometimes less error prone or more accurately. For this reason the sooner features are deployed, the sooner they can be used and return their cost of… Read More
What is #NoProjects and #NoEstimates Actually All About
The #NoEstimates twitter hashtag has been a battleground of opinions, a similar situation has also existed around the #NoProjects tag on twitter. Why have these topics polarised some people so much? What are these discussions all about? Has this public… Read More