February 10, 2006
Supporting Mission Critical Applications
During the development of a mission critical application, there is a tremendous amount of effort spent on building quality into the application. This effort is justified because once the application is deployed, the amount of downtime or system errors is expected to be minimal. The reality is there will be unexpected application responses or application functions that simply stop working, due to either slightly different data sets or a...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 02, 2005
Team Direction
Over the past six months or so I have been helping manage a team of resources that is building templates for a SQL*LIMS implementation. When I was discussing this with a member of a training class I was teaching, he asked how we were able to build all of the templates with multiple distributed resources that aligned to a set standard. At the time I could not give him a very good answer. All that I could come up with was that "we just did...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 21, 2005
Software Quality Assurance
The concept of quality has received a lot of coverage in the insight columns on this site, and I do not want to re-examine the timeless question of the origin of quality. Instead, I would like to concentrate on quality assurance. In the manufacturing industry, quality assurance is what drives the release of products and production benchmarks. The ability to produce X products with only Y defects is how production cycles are measured to...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 13, 2005
My Stop-doing List
I have been back to work for almost two weeks now following a 2 week holiday. I usually take one long holiday a year because it offers me an opportunity to fully detach from my every day life and perform an intense audit of my day-to-day decisions. Normally, this time is completely devoted to my personal life, but this year I choose to concentrate entirely on my work life. This was mostly because I was having difficultly separating my work...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 09:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 11, 2005
The Not So Quick Fix
We have all been at a place in the application life cycle where we encounter a problem in the application that creates an unexpected result. Sometimes there is a work around, other times the application must be patched. Patching an application should always be addressed carefully and approached with the utmost care. This opinion was recently strengthened in a recent (and ongoing) experience I am having with my lawn. ...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 19, 2005
Independent Test Driven Development
There are quite a few development styles that exist in the area of software development. One of these is labeled "Extreme Programming". Besides having an edgy name, this style of development suggests many outside the box ideas for improving both the quality and speed of delivery for developing systems. Personally I'm a little skeptical of some of the methods,...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 14, 2005
Decisions and Opinions
I love working at J & R. There are a lot of reasons why I feel that way, but one of the top reasons is due to the balance of opinions and decision making. This may seem like an odd balance pairing but it is vital to our company's success.
Posted by Jason Boyd at 08:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
April 14, 2005
The Contingency Plan
In my opinion, one of the most overlooked line items in a Project Plan is related to contingency. Dictionary.com's definition of contingency is "An event that may occur but that is not likely or intended; a possibility." Or "A possibility that must be prepared for; a future emergency". Every good project manager allocates a certain amount of time and associates it as...
Posted by Jason Boyd at 09:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
March 31, 2005
Maintaining Quality
Although rarely admitted quality is most often not the highest priority during application development. If it was then the project would have an un-restricted budget and the application "would be ready when it's ready".
Posted by Jason Boyd at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
March 25, 2005
Keeping your Eye on the Ball
In a large scale development project it is easy to become focused on meeting the Functional Requirements and lose sight of the purpose of these requirements. The Design cycle keeps in focus the ability for the end users to use the application after it is delivered.
Posted by Jason Boyd at 07:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
