We all know the old adage … “Quality, Features, Time: pick two”. It’s a useful reminder that trying to squeeze too many features into too little time will inevitably impact quality. It’s also a useful reminder that focussing only on quality will lead to a reduction of the rate of feature development. And it even… [Continued]
Scope creep can be a killer. Adding features to a work in progress almost always causes trouble. At its simplest, the extra work delays the delivery of the current phase of a project and increases cost. Subtler effects include a gradual degradation of the quality of a project. Changing requirements contribute to a shifting of… [Continued]
My mother always told me about the carpenter who would measure twice and cut once. It didn’t make any sense to me as a kid, but I soon understood exactly what she meant the day I built my first set of shelves. Hrm. If only I had listened to her sooner … It seems that… [Continued]
As part of any project we undertake, we usually like to work in a particular style. Now, ultimately we want to follow a process that our clients enjoy, that allows us to finish projects within a well-defined and predictable time-scale, and that allows clients to launch products earlier rather than later to give best return… [Continued]
It’s happened to the best of us; no matter what scalability plans we put into place, no matter how many horizontally scaled virtual hosts we spin up, no matter how we shard our carefully crafted data, no matter how many greens we show in our automated tests, there’s always one element that might just catch… [Continued]