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The Build is an essential cog of any software project, but it is most often maintained by identified “experts.” This needs to stop. Agile depends on shared code ownership and understanding of the system — all parts of the system. Consequences of Ignoring the Build Most sufficiently-sized projects use a continuous integration system and some…
For a recent career fair, our marketing coordinator Lisa Tjapkes produced a hand-out detailing what a marketing career involved. Part of this handout listed 6 skills that a good marketer should have: Empathy: Understand your customers; see things from their perspective. Strong Writing Skills: Be clear, be concise, be interesting. An Analytical Mind: Carefully review results….
“…no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” – Julia Child, My Life in France Or, to paraphrase the late great Julia — no one is born a great designer, one learns by doing (and testing). Cooks test out their recipes with an audience, and the same principle applies to new products…
No, not that Red Green! Even a thoroughly-tested application can wreck havoc if it hasn’t been tested in the context of a production-like system under production-like conditions. Tools like Puppet and Chef make it easy to produce a production-like environment for testing, but what about the production-like conditions? One aspect of these conditions can be…
As a designer, I’m a perfectionist. I enjoy solving problems, analyzing human intuition, and testing all the available research tools to turn ideas into something viable and realistically executable. This heuristic, analytical approach to design was what shifted me from advertising into software in the first place. I enjoyed leading creative teams, driving process innovation,…
I’ve recently been getting acquainted with C#, WPF, and the MVVM pattern. After a few months dealing with Javascript and Groovy, it has been a refreshing experience. Not having much background in C# or Windows, I’ve had to learn a lot. In order to get off the ground quickly, I chose Laurent Bugnion’s MVVM Light…
Who hasn’t heard of Wikipedia? Hands up? I’d be very surprised if anyone hasn’t. So when I saw a tweet from Chris McMahon announcing a Wikipedia community test event I had to find out more. He gave more details on his blog. It was a call for anyone interested in doing exploratory testing on Wikipedia:…
Have you ever inherited a project without any tests? Trying to get a foothold in the code can feel daunting, let alone feeling confident about making changes. I recently took over a project that lacked any tests, and as I began to explore the code, I came to a realization. Despite the fact that the…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object