Your path to business agility
Browse curated reading for engineering professionals.
As Software Engineers, we tend to get lost within our ivory towers. We are logical people, and crave logic in the world around us. The real world around us, though, is messy and frustratingly illogical. I am happiest, and most productive, when I have a well-defined Epic to work on, with clear requirements and acceptance...
Unless you are a developer who enjoys reinventing the wheel (and spending countless hours or weeks developing functionality that already exists), it’s likely that you use open source dependencies in your projects. While it is great being able to easily incorporate functionality that you didn’t write into your application, such as user management, it does...
Test management is the practice of managing, running and recording the results of a potentially complicated suite of automated and manual tests. Test management also provides visibility, traceability and control of the testing process to deliver high quality software, quickly. Tools for test management are generally used to plan and manage tests, test runs and...
As software continues to pervade our lives, the security of that software continues to grow in importance. We need to keep private data private. We need to protect financial transactions and records. We need to protect online services from infiltration and attack. We can obtain this protection through ‘Application Security’, which is all about building...
Traceability first requires the ability to connect SDLC artifacts. When tools are loosely stitched together, artifacts are not connected and there is no traceability. Without traceability, your software development process is likely cursed. We all want our teams using tooling that is optimal for each lifecycle stage, but if the tooling isn’t tightly integrated to support...
When writing software, some conversations happen over and over again. Over the years, I’ve seen different solutions to the same problem that I’d like to share with you. One of those conversations go something like this, even though the answer might differ depending on the team or component. Bob: Hey, I have some string literals...
Building cross-platform desktop applications usually means compromising on user experience, ease of development or both. Below I detail the reasoning and trade-offs behind an approach that involves state of the art technologies and development methodology with fewer compromises. Web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) are arguably the best choice for a cross-platform UI in most...
In Nicole Bryan’s latest blog published on Sys-Con Media she asks her readers to, “Consider the following integration scenarios: Moving medical records between EMR systems; financial information between banking systems; HR information between ERP systems; and software development information between SDLC tools.” She explains that at first glance the approaches required for these integrations may...
In my previous blog post I discussed how planning is key to success. Once the planning is complete, then comes the design, which can be simple to configure with our suite of integration tools. With some practice, you can configure 8 mappings between 2 projects and 4 types using templates. This includes development of the...
I’m a new Tasktopian but not new to the software trade, having spent 15 years as a software engineer at both small and large companies here in Vancouver. Last Friday marked my fourth week at Tasktop and I felt inspired to share my initial impressions. Culture is all too often underappreciated but I consider it...
