Group items tagged

"User Story is suitable for describing what user needs, but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can't write code from user stories because you have no clue on what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can't test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of "Context" and "Cause and Effect", and the imprecise way of saying "As a...I want... so that..." leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there's no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story. "

"When people invent or improve significantly new services or technologies, they are in general focused on their domains (especially software vendors who are tempted to cater to their market first). Cloud computing is no exception. IBM, For example, defines the Rainmaker technology as software and hardware that work together to help enterprises create clouds. And, as usual, the devil lives in the details, and software and hardware will work together in a very proprietary way."

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"If your team develops software through agile methodology, taking a whole-team approach is vital to getting the most out of agile practices. RelatedVendorContent Kanban for Agile Teams 3 Companies Share how they Implemented a more Collaborative Process to Deliver Software Quality Avoiding Mediocrity in Agile Adoption to Produce Tangible ROI Immediately Ten steps to better requirements management The Agile Tester Related Sponsor In today's hyper-competitive world, later may be too late to adopt Agile development and this Roadmap for Success will help you get started. Download "Agile Development: A Manager's Roadmap for Success" now! Whole-team approach - the agile practice in which the entire team works as a unit of generalizing specialists to share responsibility for producing high-quality software - is a kind of "glue" practice: It holds a lot of the other agile practices together. For example, whole-team approach is #1 on Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory's list of "key success factors" for agile testing."

" If you develop any serious software, I'm sure you're tired of manual steps required to collaborate among the various tools involved in the process of Agile software development. You need to take a hard look at IBM's Rational Team Concert (RTC) for its ability to facilitate collaboration among the multitude of tools development shops use for managing requirements, stories, code, builds, tests, deployments, issues, defects and all of the various threads that run through a large software development effort. Hint: RTC has legendary Eclipse pedigree."

"Just Enough Software Architecture book, by author George Fairbanks, focuses on a risk-driven approach to software architecture development. RelatedVendorContent Got fires in production? Find root cause in minutes. FREE Java performance tool The Agile Business Analyst Experience Java EE! 600 page Redbook Testing Platforms Analyst Comparison: IBM, Microsoft, Coverity, MKS, and more Transform IT Complexity to Achieve IT System Vitality George explains the Architecture Modeling process from different perspectives such as Engineering Use Models, Conceptual Model, Domain Model, Design Model and the Code Model. He also discusses the various architecture styles including Big ball of mud, Pipe-and-filter, Batch-sequential, Map-Reduce and talks about the distinction between architectural patterns and architectural styles. The discussion also includes topics like evolutionary design, architecture refactoring and how to analyze, test and validate the architecture models."

"Over the past decade, Red Gate has learned a lot, often the hard way, about the value of delivering software early and often or, perhaps more accurately, the cost of not doing so. Here, we explain what exactly we've learned and how we've adapted our software delivery processes, as a result. "

"Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach of how to model the core logic of an application. The term itself was coined by Eric Evans in his book "Domain Driven Design". The basic idea is that the design of your software should directly reflect the Domain and the Domain-Logic of the (business-) problem you want to solve with your application. That helps understanding the problem as well as the implementation and increases maintainability of the software."

"If you're in software development, new techniques, languages and concepts pop up all of the time. We all feel those nagging doubts every now and then: "can I keep up with the changes and stay competitive?" Take a moment, and sum a line from my favourite movie, Casablanca: "The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.""

"Kanban represents a unique way of catalyzing the application of Lean product development principles to software development, maintenance and operations. Being a method for driving change Kanban does not prescribe specific roles, practices or ceremonies but instead offers a series of principles to optimize value and flow in your software delivery system. As such, Kanban's focus on context and adaptability has made it increasingly popular for teams working in contexts where traditional Agile methods are not an easy fit and mature Agile teams looking for ways to further optimize their development process."

" Monitoring-Oriented Programming, abbreviated MOP, is a software development and analysis framework aiming at reducing the gap between formal specification and implementation by allowing them together to form a system. In MOP, runtime monitoring is supported and encouraged as a fundamental principle for building reliable software: monitors are automatically synthesized from specified properties and integrated into the original system to check its dynamic behaviors during execution. When a specification is violated or validated at runtime, user-defined actions will be triggered, which can be any code from information logging to runtime recovery. One can understand MOP from at least three perspectives: as a discipline allowing one to improve safety, reliability and dependability of a system by monitoring its requirements against its implementation at runtime; as an extension of programming languages with logics (one can add logical statements anywhere in the program, referring to past or future states); and as a lightweight formal method. "

"After I graduated from the HIO Enschede (B.Sc level) in '94 I have worked with a lot of different platforms and environments: from 4GL's like System Builder, uniVerse and Magic to C++ on AIX to Java to Perl on Linux to C# on .NET. All these platforms and environments had one thing in common: their creators were convinced their platform was the best and greatest and easiest to write software with. To some extend, each and every one of them were decent platforms and it was perfectly possible to write software with them though I'll leave the classification whether they were / are the greatest and easiest to the reader. I'll try to make clear below why this dull intro is important. "

Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format.

"As a book and methodology, DDD is an excellent way to approach complex software problems, and make them far more understandable and manageable. As a buzzword, DDD is in danger of being corrupted like many other good software practices."

"In the world of software management there exists a dread place called "dependency hell." The bigger your system grows and the more packages you integrate into your software, the more likely you are to find yourself, one day, in this pit of despair."

"I've heard (and used) YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) quite often in my software development career. It's a battle cry for shipping a minimum viable product and letting the real-world usage dictate what new features and improvements are really needed. Generally speaking I think that this ruthless minimalism is a good thing. I think we've all fallen into the "pie in the sky" thinking about adding lots of bells and whistles to whatever feature we're working on. I for one also know the feeling of spending a lot of time on one aspect of a new feature only to later discover that no one really uses it. I like to think that, over time, I've begun to develop some sense of when a given feature is likely to be useful and when I should YAGNI it out of my task list, but then again I also feel like the more I know the less I know. Lately I'm finding that when I'm in doubt it's best to err on the side of doing less and keeping things as simple as possible."

" Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a managed code library, a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL), accessible from any language targeting the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CCR addresses the need of service-oriented applications to manage asynchronous operations, deal with concurrency, exploit parallel hardware and deal with partial failure. It enables the user to design applications so that the software modules or components can be loosely coupled; meaning they can be developed independently and make minimal assumptions about their runtime environment and other components. This approach changes how the user can think of programs from the start of the design process and deals with concurrency, failure and isolation in a consistent way."

"I'll let you in on a secret: I don't care what letter you put in front of "DD." I don't care so much about how code is written or the ins-and-outs of software development. It's not because I don't realize how incredibly important it is - it's because what I care most about is the value delivered. How can what you do save me time, money and/or frustration? I'm smart enough to know that without you - the incredibly talented member of the development team - my life will go into a tailspin. Nothing will work. I realize and appreciate that what you develop creates value for me."

"We thank everyone who joined us for Jeff Sutherland's presentation on the Secrets of High Quality Development which is now available on-demand for those who may have missed it. Below, Jeff has answered some of your questions that we did not have time for during the live event. We hope you find it valuable. Please feel free to ask any additional questions in the comments. "

" Performance is a topic of increasing importance in the software industry. Today performance engineers and architects as well as operations people have to ensure that complex application landscapes works seemlessly and problems are resolved fast and with minimal effort. "

"We've all seen the statistics[1], and likely experienced first-hand, the reality of project failure. The majority of software projects continue to be classified as failures. In thinking about this situation we can see that there are a few different ways in which a project can fail (clearly this is not an exhaustive list!):"