Blog

Author: Brett Child Software developers, and IT in general, have a reputation for being over budget, being late, and not even meeting the needs of the customer. There are a million different reasons for that; such is the complex nature of software development. But, here are a few ways to reduce the risk that leads […]

Author: Neal Jenks Design Consultant | IxD Practice Manager There’s a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that perfectly encapsulates the IxD profession. Six-year-old Calvin is sporting a rather spiffing astronaut helmet and superhero cape. His mom asks, “What’s up today?” Calvin responds, “Nothing so far.” “‘So far’?” “Well you never know, something COULD happen today. […]

Delegation on iOS This tutorial is a simple basic idea to show the concept of delegation on iOS, using Objective-C. Delegation is usually not something a beginner would use, so this tutorial would be targeting intermediate users, which also means it assumes you know your way around Xcode and Objective-c at a reasonable level. Final […]

Author: Aaron Salazar A few years ago I was introduced to John Allsopp’s article “A Dao of Web Design” by a great UX designer that was on my team at the time.  Since then I’ve read a few times and have forwarded it on to co-workers in an effort to spread its good word.  The CRAZIEST part […]

I have been a software developer for a number of years and I find there are many sonic distractions in the office that prevent me from concentrating.  Sometimes it is something small like someone eating an apple in a loud way or something big like a boisterous meeting conducted in an adjacent cubicle.  A lot […]

Author: Andrea Reese Hurst At the request of an engineer who I wrote requirements for, I jotted down some tips for good requirements gathering in a software setting. Here they are, a bit tidied up: Identify the end users, the project owners, and other stakeholders who influence the success or failure of this effort. Schedule […]

Author: Craig Golightly Whenever I meet someone new and they find out I am a Software Developer they often say, “I have this project…” I used to spend time listening in detail to what they wanted to do and I even embarked on a few “side” projects. These projects were filled with late night meetings […]

Author: Andrea Reese Hurst Coming from a waterfall development environment, I was used to polishing a requirements document to the nth degree before handing it off to development, but in an Agile environment, this put me behind schedule, and didn’t even make good user stories. Here are a few things I learned while working in Agile […]

Author: Mike Chatwin I have heard horror stories from colleagues of daily scrum meetings that run over an hour… STOP IT IMMEDIATELY! A daily meeting running this long becomes a roadblock to several of the basic principles of the Agile Manifesto (www.agilemanifesto.org): – Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery […]

Author: Dan Bunker Pick any software company and take a stroll through their cubicle farm.  You’ll find developers white boarding out problems, coding and staring at 2 or 3 monitors at a time and occasionally having nerf gun wars.  Most will simply view this environment as a standard software shop but if you take a closer […]

Unless you have a background working with computer programming, when you hear the term Bash script programming you most likely don’t know what it is. Bash script programming is known for being one of the easiest to learn when it comes to computer scripting languages. But the trick is learning it well, and making the […]

Author: Jason Gillies After years of writing software I have seen a few areas that are often over looked.  These aren’t hard problems to solve.  But they do require planning.  If you take the time to think through these issues before building your application you will reduce costs for this and future applications. Don’t manage your […]

Author: Bryan Hansen Early on in my development career I came across a lot of developers who would try and learn multiple languages; at the time, this was typically Java and .Net. I would often ask people as to why they were doing this and usually got a response of, “Well, you never know which language […]

Author: Tim Collinson It is common to read articles and posts which say that the issues that organizations face when developing software are bigger than ever before. However, in many ways we face many of the same issues now as those that were common in 1975 when Fred Brooks wrote his famous essay on issues […]