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…)
