Introduction to Scrum

An introduction to Scrum, one of the flavours of Agile, covering the team structure, processes and terminology in a brief handy overview.

Introduction to Agile Practices

Heard a lot about this Agile melarkey? Wondered what it involves? This post explains the processes and practices in running a project using an Agile approach.

It covers the concepts of the approach, explains the processes involved. Describes the meetings (or ceremonies) you should have, what to discuss and what their outcomes should be. It also explains who should do what, and when.

When specs don’t work

When estimating for a project that you’re not sure you’re going to be awarded, you don’t want to spend too much time analysing the minutiae in the spec. So what do you do when you’ve won it, you’re half way through building it, and you stumble across a small, but fundamental problem?

Managing feature additions and bug fixes with Subversion

So, you’ve finished working on the initial release of an application and it goes live. At a later date you have to add an additional feature, sometimes more than one, but before these can go live, they require testing and approval.

Sometimes, the client wants subsequently implemented feature additions deployed before earlier ones. What happens if these involve changes to the same files?

In the meantime, bugs in the live application are identified and need fixing and deploying immediately, but these require changes to files that you’ve already changed for a feature addition, that is not ready to go live yet, and if it did, would break the application!

Sound familiar, if so, read on for a solution.

Functional Specs for Web Applications

Answers to questions such as “What is a functional spec?”, “Why is it important?”, “How do you write a functional spec?”, “What does it contain?”, “What does it not contain?”

Planning a Successful Website

The process involved in planning a successful website from the questions to ask your client to what to do with the information gathered, such as Information Architecture, Content Plans, Navigation and Layout.

Development Methodologies for Web Applications

A comparison of two common software development methodologies, Waterfall and Iterative, with a focus on Web Application development projects.

It describes their respective processes, examines their differences, discusses their advantages and disadvantages, and finally, identifies which situations each is most appropriate for, and their criteria for success.