What if you could double the efficiency of your software testing process, and substantially reduce errors found during the test, deployment, and maintenance phases, without purchasing any tool or method? The November 28 InformationWeek offers just that in a reprint of a recent Dr. Dobbs article on formal inspections by Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour.  They call formal inspections the “defect removal tool of choice” and back up their claim with lots of hard evidence, but I think they are still selling short.

Dear Bob Lambert, my esteemed friend and colleague, I read your article regarding your opinion that rugby is not a good analogy for agile software development. I respectfully disagree. Like you, I’m also a fan and former player. (Go James River Women!!). As a certified Scrum Master, I strongly believe that Agile is a great way to deliver software. In fact, so does Billy Tilson, another CapTech Rugger. Here’s my take on why our favorite sport is a great analogy for Agile:

If you’re getting started with Agile, you’ve probably heard a lot of terms and may not know what they all mean.  This post will define the key Agile terms and have you speaking like an Agilista in no time.

I recently completed ScrumMaster training ably presented by Lyssa Adkins. Throughout the two-day class we appreciated Lyssa’s Zen-like, enabling, style. If her name is familiar, it’s because Ms. Adkins is the author of the book Coaching Agile Teams, one of the leading texts on the subject.

I’ve participated on agile projects, but so far only in a piggish/chickenish role, once in a three-week stint as a consulting architect and twice as the project manager serving as interface to the non-agile organization. To me Ms. Adkins rocks at making students very introspective and critical of their past project experiences.  These lessons stand out:

The IT industry loves a good "Holy War". One of the latest has been the highly visible and at times down right nasty forking of the Hudson Continuous Integration server into the Jenkins Continuous Integration Server.  More recently Oracle has announced an intention to release Hudson to the Eclipse Foundation, raising some interesting questions about whether all of this could have been avoided in the first place.  

With the situation changing so rapidly, how does a development team, or company make the right choice?  After following the evolution of both of these servers, I can safely say that it doesn't matter.

Members of Qlikview said in their case study session that one of the most powerful things you can glean from analytics is finding the data you didn't know was relevant and were not looking for.  I felt the same way about the conference, I've picked up a lot of information that I wasn't expecting and have a punch list of new areas to research and become fluent in.  For example, the idea that we need to think about analytical data outside of the traditional rows and columns of a relational database and instead think about how to develop analytics from new repositories of unstructured content.  To hear industry leaders from Gartner, Teradata, Microsoft and Oracle all agree that in 5 years, the majority of analytic data we consume will come from unstructured sources is amazing given where we are today.  New concepts are evolving to help mine this data, and I know I need to spend more time learning about them to continue to be an effective practitioner.

I’ve recently completed a white paper that details a methodology employed by CapTech to deliver a SharePoint 2010 collaboration portal for an international client.  Blending Agile and Waterfall practices, CapTech delivered successfully thanks to a variety of benefits afforded to the client and CapTech by the methodology (dubbed CT Hybrid).  The full white paper is attached to this post, but here’s a sneak preview of its Conclusion:

A follow up to Delivering Data Warehousing and BI Projects using Agile:

Working as a data architect on an Agile data warehouse project for a financial services client, I had the opportunity to support multiple warehouse delivery “bays”.  Of all the lessons learned, one thing that I would highly suggest to any organization looking to embark on an Agile data warehouse delivery project, would be a solution architected to leverage a tiered data architecture that clearly separates a persistent staging environment from the integrated subject areas of an analytical data warehouse. Decoupling the “base layer” from the integrated subject areas can provide significant advantages to project teams supporting the warehouse build.

 There is a lot of buzz lately around Agile BI and Agile data warehousing.  Typical questions asked include - Does it produce better results?  Is it faster?  How much does it cost?  And of course, most importantly, is the Agile methodology a fit for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence projects?

What is Agile?