Software Development Archives – Page 5 of 8

22 Mar 2010

Agile Landscape (and Garden) Development

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:57:03-06:00March 22nd, 2010|Categories: Current Events, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

There are two main approaches to building out a nicely landscaped yard:

Waterfall – Large up front design and implementation by a contractor (whether or not an actual waterfall feature is included in the garden),
Agile – Iterative, incremental and continuous improvement of a design and implementation.

The "Waterfall" approach is typically taken by people who:

Like having a garden but don't want to be a gardener (insta-garden),
Have a significant amount of money and want the work done quickly,
Like to plan everything out on paper beforehand, and
People starting with essentially a blank slate (new home).

Planning out the hardscape (structural) parts of the landscape requires some […]

10 Mar 2010

Fe Fi Fo Scrum – I Smell the Blood of a Best Practices Man

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:57:21-06:00March 10th, 2010|Categories: Books and Courses, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

It is the time of year when gardeners start seeding plants indoors. Beans, Jack and giants suddenly popped into my head. (BTW, if you hire a landscaper, gardening is a waterfall process. If you do it yourself it is more an agile and iterative process. Things are always changing and you are never done.)

In "Succeeding with Agile" by Mike Cohn he states:

"Although team members should always look to share with one another their newly discovered good ways of working, they should resist the urge to codify them into a set of best practices."

Best practices imply perfection; a destination. Agile […]

25 Feb 2010

A Gentle Introduction to BDD

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:57:43-06:00February 25th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development|

Our team went to the subject Calgary .NET User Group session presented by David Mogantini.

I am not a developer but I was able to follow the general lessons and examples. TDD, BDD and the Cortex testing framework were covered. David plans to open source the generic part of the framework which I think many will find useful.

David did a really good job and there was some really good discussion generated during the Q&A.

Good to see the development community meeting and sharing ideas here in Calgary. Hope we can keep it up even as the developer market becomes hyper-competitive again.

24 Feb 2010

Agile and the Devil’s Advocate

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:57:52-06:00February 24th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development|

Software development has three camps regarding agile:

Outspoken True believers – everything is utopian if you only embrace it,
Outspoken Non-believers – nothing good there, would rather eat grass than have anything to do with it,
Somewhere in the middle – good and bad in everything, use what you can and adapt as you go.

There is actually a fourth camp; the oblivious (software developers who don't care enough about their craft to investigate options).

Fortunately, most developers (at least the ones I know) fall into the somewhere in the middle.

Humans when faced with change; encounter fear… the resistance.

Some ignore the fear and blindly accept the change,
Some […]

12 Feb 2010

Hiring Developers in 2010

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:58:19-06:00February 12th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Dream Teams, Software Development, Technology|

It looks like Sunwapta Solutions will be hiring in 2010 to support our current clients and our growth plans. This likely includes:

Marketing and Sales
Software Developers
Product Manager

The first hire will be a developer. The position has not been fully defined or posted yet, but if you know of a great intermediate to senior developer in Calgary with all or a bunch of the following skills please pass them on:

Strong object oriented design and development skills,
Current to leading edge C# and .NET framework,
Very strong in user interface (HTML, CSS, AJAX, Silverlight,WPF, etc.) design and development. You can make things happen on the user […]

17 Jan 2010

How Software Development Really Works

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:59:38-06:00January 17th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development|

This post is based on a presentation we sent to a client when they wanted early screen shots of the working application and said we seemed to be a serious bunch. We are serious about our work (building great software) but do have some fun doing it.

Initial Specifications – Build Something that Works

Make it better than a horse and buggy but not too fancy.

During the budgeting phase the requirements are a little down-played.

Project Startup – Application Framework

The developers scramble to put together the framework and plumbing that […]

12 Jan 2010

Development and Business Optimization

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:18:53-06:00January 12th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development, Technology|

The other day a developer asked me what we really know about business optimization; after all, developers build software not run businesses.

I would suggest that the right kinds of developers are exactly the right people to help with business optimization. I say help because no one person should be responsible for business optimization; it should be something done by everyone in your business and any external advisers as a team. No one person has all the answers and every business is different.

So if you are great developer what talents and skills can you bring to the table? Great developers:

Regularly work […]

4 Nov 2009

Manifesting Your Strategy

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:21:17-06:00November 4th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

As I mentioned earlier this week, I have committed to the future being different than the past and have been focusing as much on long-term strategic work as dealing with day to day issues.

Another milestone was reached today at Sunwapta Solutions.

We've been building (organically) software tools to help small businesses succeed. Well the first thing a business needs to do to succeed is focus on strategic initiatives and get their heads out of the day to day grind.

Today we internally launched release 1.0 Beta of a tool (Silverlight, .NET and SQL Server for the techies) that will be used to help […]

21 Sep 2009

Our Company Purpose

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:23:11-06:00September 21st, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development, Technology|

As I have mentioned before, we have been working on our corporate web site. It is always hardest to work on your own stuff for some reason. Client projects, proposals and hundreds of other things get in the way.

We've been looking at what we are good at, our past projects for clients and where we want to be. I also wanted something strong that we can get excited about, fits in with where we are going right now with our products and goes with my strong interest in what makes a business succeed. In the end, we have come up with the […]

27 Aug 2009

Cloud Computing – Does Anyone Really Care?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:24:55-06:00August 27th, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development, Technology|

Lately cloud computing has been getting a lot of buzz. It is a giant umbrella for either hosting your applications "out on the Internet" or acquiring software hosted by someone "out on the Internet".

It is actually quite funny in a way. An evolutionary happening is being sold as a revolution.

The cloud has been there for years. The hype is newer.

Reality

A large percentage of people don't really understand computers, hardware, software, networks and the Internet very well at all. They really don't care where something is running or where the data ends up as long as:

It is easy to use,
It works […]