What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? Continuing from our prior post in January, let’s know discuss some aspects of using these percentage values in the context of how to guarantee availability. ...
I will not stretch the analogy of jugglers juggling and engineering teams engineering too far. In brief, software and system engineering teams can benefit from working on a few things simultaneously but too many or too few can cause everything to fall apart. ...
What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? ...
A couple incomplete thoughts and questions for those that need to automatically log end users out of web applications. ...
There has been a dearth of posts to this site. Part of the reason for this is that I got busy playing Overwatch by Blizzard. The underlying mechanics of the game are team based and players must work together to achieve success. Failures in the game are often due to players not working together effectively. These sorts of failures can have lessons for teams working on projects in a professional capacity; today we’ll look at a couple of team failure modes and consider ways they can be rectified. ...
Today’s post is short essay concerning the value of development led quality. There are no code examples or short tips for things in this post. I hope you enjoy. ...
Today’s post will cover a couple different approaches to transfering techinical knowledge of a software system between individuals or teams. There are often transfers of ownership as a software product progresses from conception to feature development to ongoing maintainence. Effective knowledge transfers between owning individuals or teams help to ensure that ongoing development of a product is not totally stalled whenever ownership chagnes ...
Developing new software involves resolving a frequently unknown quantity of problems of unknown complexity. Even when working on existing projects, new initiatives and features can contain a unknown total amount of complexity. While being appealing modern product management methods, scrum and other related methodologies focus on relative estimation which has limitations when starting brand new work. Today’s post looks at some of our limitations when it comes to estimation and what is implied by those limits. ...
A 1st generation software product will likely miss the mark. It might have missed being that best that it could be by costing too much, being too complex, or just not targeting the right market. In any case, a 1st product may lead to another, 2nd, product that is cheaper, simpler, or just hits the right notes with the intended customer. Today’s post is about building the wrong product (the 1st one) in the right way so that the 2nd product can be built better, faster. ...
IT consulting is an odd place to be when it comes to software engineering practices. We often end up writing software for business groups that have fixed budgets and more importantly fixed deadlines. We also try to follow an agile methodology for software development that roughly follows scrum (warning: PDF), but with defined roles for a project manager and a development lead. Today’s post discusses some of the difficulties seen in using Agile to deliver business software and how we can mitigate those difficulties, basically things that worked and things that didn’t. ...