Measuring the wrong things is worse than not measuring anything. In this article, Mallika Gunturu explains the right things to measure for agile.… Read more
Alan Cooper helped to debug the most widely-used PC language of the late seventies and early eighties, BASIC-E, and, with Keith Parsons, developed C-BASIC. He then went on to create Tripod, which morphed eventually into Visual Basic in 1991. Alan remains enthusiastic and interested in development with strong views on Agile and Pair Programming.… Read more
Behaviour Driven Development is not always clearly understood, and the term is particularly unfamiliar in database circles. Seb Rose introduces us to the fundamentals of BDD, and make some suggestions for how it might be relevant to database development.… Read more
What is IT Compliance and is it really necessary for contemporary Agile applications to be constrained by the requirements of compliance? William Brewer argues that if the objective is rapid delivery of applications, then compliance controls must be understood as early as possible in development.… Read more
To access SQL Server from the client, you use TDS protocol over TCP. This is fine over reliable LANs but over the internet these connections are relatively slow and fragile, TDS is still used to connect to databases in the cloud, but you need to use a combination of the new features such as connection pools and idle connection resiliency to make applications faster and more reliable. … Read more
Alex and his team at Inedo are developing a game - inspired by development strategies like Lean, Agile and DevOps - about software and some of the people who make it. In this opening of a short series, Alex looks at how games affected his office culture, what he's learned about designing games to do more than just be fun, and how his team are hoping to share their passion with the developer community.… Read more
Agile methodologies work well with database developments only if great care is taken to do things right. It requires good judgement and leaves little room for error. Dev Nambi, in an extract from the book Tribal SQL, argues that Agile works for smart, curious, and experienced software engineers.… Read more
Alex Kuznetsov describes the agile principles, techniques and tools that allowed his development team to make frequent database refactoring a reality, without disrupting users. He explains how this allowed his team to apply an iterative, evolutionary approach to the design and development of their databases, as well as applications.… Read more
Ruby on Rails, the open-source web application framework, grew out of David Heinemeier Hansson's work on Basecamp at 37Signals. It is now so popular with developers that it has been shipped with Mac OSX since 2007, and has a dedicated Windows following. Rail's focus on software engineering patters and Agile philosophy were so intriguing that we decided that DHH should be Geek of the Week. … Read more
Jez Humble and David Farley achieved fame through a book that tackled the least glamorous but most intricate part of the application development cycle, Deployment. It was no accident that the book achived so much attention, since it was a lively and iconoclastic take on a vital but neglected aspect of development upon which the ultimate success of software projects so often depend. We found Jez to be an interesting guy, too! … Read more
When Agile meets 'Big Design', the result can be frustration on both sides. Is it possible for database development to to easily coexist with Agile methodologies for application development? Nick suggests that the technical solutions already exist, and the dissonance is more due to cultural and organisational problems… Read more
Software projects fail for all sorts of reasons, although the same reasons crop up over and over again. The ICONIX process might offer a way out.… Read more
