User research is a team sport as many user research teams – particularly those working in agile development teams, such as the GDS User research team – have discovered. This discovery is perhaps due to the growing realisation that user research in the agile software development cycle has the greatest impact when it isn’t... Read more
Developers and testers generally don’t like to work on a mature product with a legacy code base, especially when the majority of the team has no previous knowledge of either. Having said that, while building and testing a mature product can prove a lot more challenging than tackling a greenfield one, my recent experiences suggest there... Read more
Package managers are brilliant. The obvious win is the convenience of versioning your dependencies without having to commit binaries to Git. Lots of people use package managers for third party dependencies, but I’m going to talk about using them for components within an organisation. This is where package managers fulfil their true potential – making... Read more
The amount of JavaScript code being used at Redgate is increasing quite rapidly. We are writing more web based products and also opting to use web technologies like CEF for our desktop products, so it is inevitable that a lot of our code is going to be written in JavaScript, like it or not.... Read more
FlexiGroup is a diversified financial services group providing point of sale interest free, no interest ever, leasing, vendor programs, interest free cards and other payment solutions to consumers and businesses. We talk to Damian Haynes, Senior Application Developer at FlexiGroup, about why his team selected ReadyRoll as their database change management tool. How did... Read more
I’ve run plenty of face-to-face usability sessions, but since joining Redgate I’ve found myself having to run remote sessions. I’ve discovered a great technique and in doing so I have also stumbled upon some unexpected consequences of using it. Redgate has a vast user base, and it turns out that a significant portion of... Read more
I’m a project manager, so unsurprisingly I can find myself in animated conversations with other project managers regarding how best to manage the work that our team members are doing. We all have our favourite techniques and methods, but the process generally starts with making the work each member of the team is planning... Read more
Sssshhh. There’s a revolution going on. Quietly, purposefully, and without fanfare, Database Lifecycle Management is looming on the horizon for every developer and DBA. A continuous, agile-based approach to integrating, coordinating and managing the different phases of database delivery. Whoah, there. Database Lifecycle Management? Application Lifecycle Management, yes, but how on earth can you... Read more
We’ve been working on a new product that involves writing Windows PowerShell cmdlets (pronounced “commandlets”) for our customers to use and, to make their lives easy, we want to provide rich built-in help documentation. There’s no easy way to do this out of the box, so I’ve written a tool that allows us to... Read more
The “extended” UX team sharpening their swords… At Redgate, our software engineers run regular “code katas”, workshops where developers practise their coding skills on simple problems, then discuss the experience afterwards as a learning exercise. So, a while ago, I thought it might be a good idea to use the same Kata principle on... Read more
