Category Archives: App Dev

Be careful with agile methods if…

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I’ve written a number of posts about agile techniques of project management on this site, all in a spirit of advocacy. A comment on the most recent reminded me that agile/scrum isn’t necessarily the right solution in all situations, and in some it may work but needs to be applied carefully. After that comment I thought it would be interesting to write about situations in which agile methods should be applied with care, if at all: Continue reading →

So Agile/Scrum Really IS Like Rugby

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OK, I’ve lost a five-metre scrum, my pack has been overrun, and the ref has raised his arm between the sticks for a penalty try.  My colleague Margy Thomas, with support of fellow rugger Billy Tilson, has convincingly argued that agile development in fact is very like rugby union. Margy cleverly fended my meager one-point case with a point-by-point list of the ways that agile projects and rugby are similar. I’ll hold on to my view that sports analogies are generally weak in describing application development, but I’ve come to observe a fundamental similarity between rugby and agile/scrum. Continue reading →

Big Data opportunities and NoSQL challenges

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As a relational database professional I couldn’t help but feel like something would be lost with the emergence of the new Big Data/NoSQL database management systems (DBMS). After about two years of buzz around the topic, I’m really excited about the emerging possibilities. However, I’m pretty sure we’ll miss the relational model’s strengths in requirements definition and conceptual design. Continue reading →

A QlikView QuickStart: first steps for learning QlikView desktop

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QlikTech’s QlikView reporting and analysis tool is among a new class of Business Intelligence (BI) software tools. As Ben Harden reported in a recent blog post, BI vendors like SAP, Microsoft, and IBM have traditionally sold “to the IT enterprise, but companies like QlikTech and Tableau are targeting the business and bypassing IT. Their tools are quicker to stand up, more intuitive and don’t need the configuration, support, and hardware that the bigger players require.”

A Quick Overview

At first look QlikView is fairly accessible to those experienced with BI tools. A “.qvw” QlikView file contains three classes of user-facing components: a script-based data integration language that runs when the user requests a “reload”, a data modeling component that looks deceptively like a relational data modeling tool, and a familiar array of data visualizations: graphics, charts, lists, etc.

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Double test efficiency and build app dev culture at no charge

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What if you could double the efficiency of your software testing process, and substantially reduce errors found during the test, deployment, and maintenance phases, without purchasing any tool or method? The November 28 InformationWeek offers just that in a reprint of a recent Dr. Dobbs article on formal inspections by Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour.  They call formal inspections the “defect removal tool of choice” and back up their claim with lots of hard evidence, but I think they are still selling short. Continue reading →

Abstracting and recombining all the way to the bank

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In the past I’ve never understood what people really mean they say “think outside the box” but Jim Harris, in a recent OCDQ blog post, helped me figure it out.

Mr. Harris ends with this provocative line: “the bottom line is Google and Facebook have socialized data in order to capitalize data as a true corporate asset.”  The post starts with a cold war analogy and proceeds to describe how Facebook and Google have made big money as “internet advertising agencies:” offering free services with which users (like us) serve up personal data in return for use of the service, then selling advertising space based on our data (hopefully anonymized).

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Get an early start for on-time data modeling

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I’m a data modeler, so I enjoyed Jonathon Geiger’s recent article entitled “Why Does Data Modeling Take So Long”.  But why does he say it like it’s a bad thing?

Mr. Geiger’s bottom line is exactly right: “Most of the time spent developing data models is consumed developing or clarifying the requirements and business rules and ensuring that the data structure can be populated by the existing data sources.”  On the projects he describes, no one took time before modeling to determine available data sources and identify business entities of interest, relationships among them, and attributes that describe them before database design started, so the data modeler had to do it.

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Thoughts after agile training: strengthening values, reducing the cost of honesty, and growing apps

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I recently completed ScrumMaster training ably presented by Lyssa Adkins. Throughout the two-day class we appreciated Lyssa’s Zen-like, enabling, style. If her name is familiar, it’s because Ms. Adkins is the author of the book Coaching Agile Teams, one of the leading texts on the subject.

I’ve participated on agile projects, but so far only in a piggish/chickenish role, once in a three-week stint as a consulting architect and twice as the project manager serving as interface to the non-agile organization.

To me Ms. Adkins rocks at making students very introspective and critical of their past project experiences.  These lessons stand out:

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Health care data security: how bad is it?

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It is really bad, according to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute (available here with registration). The white paper, entitled Health Data at Risk in Development: A Call for Data Masking, presents the results of a survey of 492 health care IT professionals on their companies’ practices regarding use of live personal health care data in application testing.

It makes a scary read.  Here are the lowlights: Continue reading →

Building a writing culture in application development

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One of the key skills needed in today’s IT shop is communication, and one of the best ways to improve ability to communicate is to write blog posts and articles.

In spite of “IT guy” stereotypes, communication and analytical thinking about business are among the most important skills in application development. Developers, analysts, and managers require ability to interact effectively with business people, to conceptualize solutions that match business needs, critically evaluate those solutions, and effectively make the case for one of them. Of course this is true of the overall project business case, but more importantly it applies to the daily “IT guy” to business person conversations that happen throughout analysis, design, development, and testing. Continue reading →