Introducing an Agile Environment For Your Business Intelligence Team

,

Agile is like Big Data – a buzzword that has been around for a couple of years already, but for which, in the end many people don’t actually know precisely what it is or how it works. Let’s start by putting everyone on the same level and go over the basics of the Agile method.

Agile consists in an iterative approach to software development, that builds the software incrementally – meaning that from the start of the project, step by step, a little bit of it is delivered at different stages, instead of delivering it all at once. It is like filling one glass of water after another, instead of giving away a full tank. Agile breaks down the project into little glasses of water, these bits of user functionality called user stories, ranks them according to their priority, and delivers them continuously in short cycles of two weeks: the iterations.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

The Free Dog is Never Free

,

I was having a discussion with fellow technologist Timothy and he ended up telling me a story from his college days.

In this story, his roommate arrived back at their apartment with a dog. The roommate was excited, but Timothy did not match his level of enthusiasm over the newest member of their household.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Balancing Change Management, Its Complexity and Agility

,

Change management can be a cumbersome, even clumsy, practice that might even be classified as rigid. Add in an Agile mindset and the process seems at odds with each other. Interested in maintaining an Agile environment while navigating change management? Well, then, the following will help us intermingle the two approaches for managing change requests.

Is Agile for Standard or Non-Standard Changes?

Agile tends to be a better fit for non-standard changes given its fluidity. An Agile environment is always in development, always changing according to the needs of the project or the organization. Agile helps to attack work that’s unpredictable and effervescent. Standard changes, of course, are usually moved along in as predictable a manner as possible and can be slow and plodding.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Why Visual Story Maps are Better

,

Visual story mapping is more than creating your run-of-the-mill to-do list. It is the best technique to enable your entire product management team to visualize multiple dimensions of information – and focus on how everything will come together to form a successful solution. Visual story maps align all product managers and create a common understanding of what needs to get done and how to go about doing it.

If you’re not convinced yet, here are the top reasons why easy Agile user story maps are better than any other product management tool out there.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Using the Bridge Design Pattern in Java

,

In continuation of my previous articles on design patterns, here I am with another very useful pattern — the bridge design pattern.

Bridge Design Pattern

  • The bridge design pattern is a structural pattern used to decouple an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.

    Source de l’article sur DZONE

/0 Commentaires/par

The Growth and Scope of IoT in Oil and Gas [Infographic]

,

The deployment of IoT in the oil and gas industry ensures better field communication, real-time monitoring, digital oil field infrastructure, reduced cost of maintenance, mine automation, reduced power consumption, higher productivity, and, thus, enhanced safety and security of assets and workforce.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

/0 Commentaires/par

Focus: The Leadership Superpower

,

My wife is an event organizer, and in her early conferences, juggling a load of must-do items and decisions was a key pain-point as she kept many critical plates spinning. The stress of keeping all of it in her head at the same time filled up the cognitive capacity she had available to actually work on any of it.

We’ve all had people at work who’s answer to "When will that thing be done?" is always countered with "I’m working on it…" And, it never seems to be done. The most helpful people in taking on work are the least helpful in completing it.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Scrum Retrospective 5: Close The Retrospective

,

This is the fifth and last post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective. In this post, I cover Phase 5 – Close the Retrospective.

If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series you can start with Phase 1 – Setting the stage.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Surgery on Legacy Code

, ,

One of my early blog posts that I wrote nearly 10 years ago that I called "Sony Baloney" discussed how the electronics giant cultivated some unusual, yet highly successful practices. One of the practices that Sony is known for is taking young and inexperienced engineers and putting them on new product development, while their senior engineers focus on reworking and redesigning their successful products to be more cost-effective. I consider this to be a very wise practice and so do they.

We want innovation in new products but we always want to balance it so that our work is maintainable and cost-effective. The electronics industry pays a lot of attention to this because manufacturing is expensive. Of course, there are no manufacturing costs, per se, in the software industry but there are maintenance and ongoing costs for software and that’s actually where the bulk of our funds are spent. So, paying attention to the maintainability of our code is quite important yet often overlooked.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

/0 Commentaires/par

How to Get Your Website Ready for Open Enrollment

,

Every year, come fall, Americans can enroll in health insurance programs for the upcoming year. As this is no decision to take lightly, people take time in advance to research plans, gather information and study the topic. This is also an opportunity for health insurance companies to draw crowds to their websites, to read about their offerings. Therefore, health insurance companies and government websites should expect traffic spikes way before Nov. 1st, the day open enrollment begins, and up until the sign-up period ends.

To ensure people seeking insurance can access the different plans and services, health insurance companies and agencies should test their websites, apps, and APIs. These tests should check the performance of the systems under different loads, to make sure they don’t crash, there are no memory leaks, response time stays low, etc. Otherwise, customers will choose different plans, and express their anger at the companies and the government across social media (you can learn more and view a demo from our free webinar about preparing your website for peak traffic on Open Enrollment).

Source de l’article sur DZONE

/0 Commentaires/par