A few weeks ago I looked up “agility” on wikipedia to help with a marketing piece. I wanted to explain how our company’s philosophies on agile software development also applied to our entire operation.
My presumption was that the concept of agile software development is still relatively unknown, so I would need to define the concept in an easily digestable way.
Recently I found myself in a situation where I needed to define a persistent many-to-one relationship in which the concrete class of the many side could vary. In the past I’d had some issues with class inheritence and Hibernate, which can get sticky because of Hibernate proxies: you can’t always cast the proxies to the desired type. Since I had to find a way to make this work, I decided to give interface inheritence a try. I started with a lightweight interface for a persistent object:
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In the age of information overload, no one wants to read through text-heavy requirements documentation. I’ve adopted a strategy of “show don’t tell” which requires less stakeholder effort while improving the quality of feedback and participation in the analysis effort. The cornerstone of this strategy is the wireframe – a universal communications tool that illustrates the user experience while providing implementation details that streamline the transition into the development effort.
Last week I made a big career jump. I went from online journalism and the non-profit sector to contracting for this VERY busy technology firm. Humbling? Yes. Terrifying? Check. Absolutely fascinating and satisfying? That too!
We specialize in the “Agile Approach.” I assumed it just meant flexible – little did I know how much there is to agility. I ended up here after working with Phase 2 as a client, and had often told people of their iterative approach to web development – without realizing I was only partially explaining the concept of the agile approach.
My research started with Wikipedia.
There I learned about the existence of an Agile Manifesto. A manifesto? Really?
Folks around here, having been practioners for years, wonder if the agile approach has gone mainstream.
I’m just learning all it encompasses. When I read more, I find myself thinking, “yes, that’s it. That just makes sense.”
If, like me, you aren’t familiar with the Agile Approach to software development, check out these great resources:
http://www.phase2technology.com/approach.php
http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html
http://www.agilealliance.org/show/2
http://www.agilejournal.com/magazine.html
I think you’ll also find yourself nodding and thinking, “yes, this is the approach I want my web developers to use.”
With all the Java-based applications and frameworks Google has rolled out over the last year or two, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to take any of them for a test drive yet. Even though January has already come and gone, it’s never too late to make a few more resolutions, right? So with the entire Internet as my witness (or at least those that read this blog), I announce my intention to at least play around with the following three Google apps before the end of the year: (more…)
So your organization needs a website? Maybe a content management system (CMS)? With a little smattering of customer relationship management (CRM)? Oh wait, you need some Web 2.0… you know, some cool stuff! Better not forget analytics. And do you want some fries with that?
Picking features for your organization’s website can sometimes feel like you’re ordering from the drive through at Burger King. But at Burger King you know exactly what you’re getting and exactly how much it will cost. But have you thought about the costs after you scarf down that double Whopper with cheese? The indigestion, the big butt, the extra 30 minutes you’ll need on the elliptical at the gym? Okay, so I’m being silly, but I’m trying to make a point. That’s kind of the way websites are.
Drupal Views are a fairly wonderful creation. They allow all kinds of usable, well….VIEWS, of your data in a Drupal site. They allow you to view your data either as a page or a block (or an RSS feed, etc), however one thing was was lacking was the ability to page content within a view block. The default view blocks provide you simply with a “more” link that will take you to the full blown page view. Thta was not working for us, or one of our clients and something has to give.
At Phase2, as we develop more and more Drupal Platforms (more on this another time) we wind up with many custom modules that are not contributed back to drupal.org. They are either too tied to a specific client, or something that is not ready for general consumption, or frankly, the client might see as a strategic competitive advantage. Regardless of the reason, for modules not hosted on drupal.org you lose some ability to have the wonderful update_status module provide info to your site implementations when the custom modules are out of date….or so I thought.
Having done most of my web development work with Java over the last several years, I am familiar with many of the open source Java frameworks such as Struts, WebWork (now Struts2) and Hibernate, as well as the features that are part of any servlet container such as JSPs and container managed security. These technologies have been around for several years now and I would consider all of them fairly mature. So, when I was recently faced with the challenge of developing a web application in PHP, I went surfing the web for PHP frameworks that would adhere to many of the design patterns and philosophies that are prevalent in these popular Java web frameworks. Little did I know that I was in for a wild ride through a sea of PHP frameworks that ranged from the extremely simple ones that only provide a few basic functions to the overly complex ones that attempt to provide anything and everything you’d ever need to build an application!
What could be so dangerous about planning, you ask?
Most project managers see planning as the first and most helpful step they can take towards getting their projects off on the right foot.
Yet, in the process of planning, PMs often miss the forest for the trees. Forgetting to re-plan your project, missing the business case, or building a project plan that is too complicated for the effort it is meant to support can doom your plans to failure.
In this blog entry, I’ll talk a bit about each of these risks, and how to avoid them.
