Limit Work to Capacity
Hard work does not pay off. At least not if your ultimate goal is to improve at what you do. And not if what you do is quality product development. In that case you need to build in slack for learning into the system. You want everyone to have time for sharing, improving and learning continuously, [...]
Posted on 22 April 2010 | 9:50 pm
Automated Unit Testing for JavaScript
In our work towards Continuous Deployment and an improved approach to JavaScript we are missing one very important thing – automated unit testing for JavaScript. Currently we have have some tests written in TestCase that will run in the browser. But we need away to automate this without the need of a browser so we have [...]
Posted on 3 March 2010 | 4:53 pm
A first look at JavaScript Frameworks
In our discussion today about Javascript frameworks we finally came to a conclusion, of sort, regarding when to use frameworks. In back office applications we can use whatever framework we want. It is used by a small number of people and we have total control over possible dependencies and namespace collisions, so we do not [...]
Posted on 22 February 2010 | 1:31 pm
No Scrum, No More
After listening to Olve Maudal at the Lean Meetup in Oslo yesterday, and after reading some of his tweets today (@olvemaudal) I realized that we never informed our readers that we are not doing Scrum anymore. I don’t think we have for 9 months or more. We were quite elaborate, if [...]
Posted on 11 February 2010 | 12:11 am
JavaScript: Tools, Coding Standard and Guidelines
We’re currently devoting an hour each Monday to collectively work our way through JavaScript. Our aim is to point to the key areas of interest and improvement, and to dig into each area one by one. We are maintaining a TOC for our JS-discussions here. Development Tools Firebug is the most important development tool for us, without comparison. [...]
Posted on 8 February 2010 | 2:54 pm
Enterprise JavaScript Coding
Not many years ago, people would giggle and think of enterprise and JavaScript as an oxymoron. Not so much anymore. If you want to be a serious actor even in (or maybe especially in) the enterprise software market, you have to take JavaScript seriously. Large parts of your product’s business logic might find its way [...]
Posted on 1 February 2010 | 3:55 pm
Notes on Continuous Deployment
Scenario: A customer has a problem with your software. His questions makes you think and you get an idea for a feature improvement. A good one! Act on it. Plan it Code it Test it Commit it Deploy it Nothing out of the ordinary, it seems. The seemingly new thing about continuous deployment is that we remove all the waiting in [...]
Posted on 21 January 2010 | 11:00 pm
Great Software : A Definition
Defining what great software is, is not a complex endeavor. I prefer to boil it down into two distinct characteristics. a) Ease of Use The software solution walks you gently through the process of solving your problems as intended. No distractions, no unnecessary decisions to make, no confusions, always heading towards the goal. In short : A [...]
Posted on 16 January 2010 | 4:00 pm
Quality and speed. A primer in team design.
How you design your team has a great deal to say for the speed and quality of the resulting work the team will do. Speed The ultimate ideal for speed is a one-man show. There’s this one guy doing everything in the project. He is competent in engineering practices such as software design, scaling and testing, and he [...]
Posted on 8 January 2010 | 4:00 pm
3 Major Problems With the Software Industry
There are three prominent problems in the software industry that bothers me in particular at the moment. Being a part of that industry, I feel somewhat responsible to help shed some light on these problems. I list each problem below, with a proposed solution outlined. Problem 1. Foot-in-the-door Software The recipe for creating foot-in-the-door software is really [...]
Posted on 3 January 2010 | 1:11 am