Reducing Waste In The Software Development Lifecycle
We all know that when you find defects late in the development lifecycle, it is going to take more time (and cost more money) to fix them than if they were discovered sooner. It makes sense that if you can identify and eliminate waste early in the process, you can reduce cycle times and gain the flow-on benefits of reduced costs. But the challenge has always been to understand the best way to ensure we find defects (or potential defects) as early as possible – and there is no one-size-fits-all answer that will be appropriate for every environment.
Clustering And Operational Cost
Clustering is a great deployment topology if your primary goal is to avoid service disruption. Effectively it gives you two or more copies of not only your application but also (depending on your application and server) the customer state. This allows a customer to continue to operate on another instance if the first instance they were using becomes unavailable.
Disaster Recover - Perceived Risk Vs Cost
Disaster Recovery is about ensuring your business can continue running after a disaster strikes. It is important to understand the different types of disaster your systems may suffer and decide whether they are a significant risk to your business or not.
Mobile Development: Native Vs. Web
Having recently completed some research for a whitepaper on mobile development, in particular looking at options for a code once, deploy to many framework, I thought it might be timely to put down some on the insights that this research has lead to, in particular the growing debate around "native" mobile apps vs. HTML5 based web apps.
CRM 2011 - Visualise Business Data Using Charts
In the first "where's the business value" article we looked at how the breadth and depth of data visualisations within CRM 2011 provide a powerful tool for gaining business advantage by providing the ability to bubble to the surface critical business information, or alternatively allow users to spot trends and drill down for more information.
CRM 2011 – Where’s The Business Value (Part 1)
Use CRM 2011's built in custom charting to quickly and easily visualise data the way you want.
Agile For Integration Projects?
In recent years the agile approach to software development has become increasingly used in the IT industry, and as experience has been gained and the approach has matured it is now often the preferred approach for software development projects. Of course with success in one area (software development), there can be a desire to replicate that success, using that approach, in other types of projects - for example projects that are predominantly software integration oriented. This leads to some interesting questions - is the agile approach appropriate for other types of projects such as integation projects? Are there good examples of success out there?
What Makes A Great Tech Team?
There’s been an interesting debate raging over at the Harvard Business Review lately on what makes a great team (and I don’t use the word ‘raging’ lightly - check out some of the comments!). In short, the argument on one side says a team of good performers is going to achieve better over the long term than one or two stars. On the other side, from people in the tech industry in particular, the counter-argument is that one great performer - a star, if you will - is going to be many times more productive than a whole team of ‘pretty good’ people. The counter-arguers point to studies of programmers, in particular, that show ‘great’ programmers can be five-to-10 times more productive than ‘good’ or even ‘very good’ programmers. As Otago University head of Computer Science Brendan McCane pointed out in this week’s Computerworld, this sort of differential is even found amongst third year students at Yale University, where presumably just about everyone is already well above average before even getting out of the starting blocks.
News From Microsoft's World Partner Conference
While those of us stuck in New Zealand shiver through the first big winter storms, Optimation's own Neil and Sharon Butler are off in sunnier climes, enjoying the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. This is a massive event, with around 12,000 attendees and a dizzying array of sessions to choose from. Given our roots and our focus on the software development life cycle, we Optimates are particularly interested in the latest developments related to the core MS application platform, including things like SQL Server's BI capabilities, BizTalk for integration, and Visual Studio.
Oracle & Cloud Computing
What is Oracles cloud strategy? Having wondered this myself I decided to attend the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Computing Seminar in Wellington.
