From Agile methods to empowerment

After attending an evening presentation of the Calgary Agile Users Group at the University of Calgary, I was again amazed by the statistics concerning the number of project failures in software development.

The evening's presentation was originally scheduled for "Architecture" in development terms, but it was more to do with how to increase the probability of project success using agile methods. While most of the developers there were C++ or Java developers, I could picture how the Launch Vision projects could be better utilized to provide better development. One of the points that struck me was the need we have for more testing, particularly acceptance testing. While we are under time constraints and we are always learning new or more efficient methods of programming, we forget the need for testing in the effort to get the software that we are creating into the testing environment.

Another point I thought was important was the speaker's idea that more craftsmanship is needed in software development. It is probably true that the majority of developers will take the easiest path to get a product working and out on time, regardless of whether or not it is the best method. The problem, I think, is that we developer's do not see ourselves as professionals - maybe misfits, rebels or whatever cliche you want, but in fact the majority of coders work in professional or at least semi-professional environments where our products are created for specific needs and usually for specific clients. I've thought for a while that people in the IT industry - specifically developers, architects, testers, projects managers, etc. - should be in a professional society, similar to those for professional engineers. Just a thought, but I think it is an important one...

Another busy week ends

So, this afternoon was taken up by figuring out how to get an error page working on the application - not that the page itself was difficult, but trying to get the application to fire it back the error message and stack trace back to the client side was tricky. I got it working through using a cookie in the global config file, using the error messages as string values that the cookie held. Then I set a one minute limit before the cookie would expire. On the error page (set in the web.config file) the cookie was picked up, the strings split out of the cookie, and then set into a nicely formatted page.

I realized today that I'm going to have to give a talk to the interns about holding values in the session - it is really useful, although some are having trouble grasping the concept of it. Need to better explain it, I think.

A new competition

The Patent Insider team started a stock buying competition on Virtual Stock Exchange today, to pit our investor instincts against each other, as well as test the application that we're working on. The competition would seem strange to an outsider as most of the action will be on Tuesdays only (when the patents come out) although the selling could happen at any time, depending on what each of us feels is the optimum selling point for a particular stock that we hold.

Useful stock symbol: Biotechnologies Index (AMEX) on Yahoo Financial - ^BTK