Tools don't solve problems, thinking does
[Talk at SDN Event, December 13, Achmea Zeist] To cut to the chase, those of you who have worked on enterprise or service oriented projects already know this. These projects are characterized by a large number of organizational, functional and technically complicating factors, such as many different stakeholders, complex IT landscapes including many web sites, enterprise service busses and SAP […]
From April 12-14 the next edition of Microsoft’s MIX Conference will take place in Las Vegas. I’ve sent in two proposals for the Open Call. Today heard that both proposals made it through the first cut, which means they’re open for public voting (you don’t have to be registered). It would be great if you would cast your vote for […]
[Half-day interactive session at client in Wageningen] This is the last session in a series of half-day interactive training sessions I did this year for the developer community of a client in Wageningen. Over the year I’ve have addressed and discussed topics such as agile versus waterfall, service oriented architecture, software architecture, smart use cases, software estimation, design patterns, dependency […]
[Half-day training course at government agency, Apeldoorn] Smart use cases are quickly becoming a widely adopted standard for modeling requirements in various types of software development projects. Alongside with the modeling approach to smart use cases, estimating software development projects using smart use cases is also quickly gaining popularity. An example of how project progress can be tracked using smart […]
Highly interactive client session, using some slides but mostly a whiteboard, where I introduced the concepts of agile software development and service oriented architecture to a smaller company that heavily relies on a custom build ERP system, and that needs to implement a number of new websites and possibly an enterprise service bus.
Handling events in ASP.NET is not always as straightforward as it seems. One particular pattern that often occurs is that there’s several items in a row in a GridView control that trigger commands. Now the GridView supports several standard commands such as Select and Delete, but what if you want to issue your own command? As an example, here’s my […]
Om kosten te besparen, een veelgenoemde aanleiding voor Business Intelligence (BI) projecten, wilde een bekende overheidsinstantie weten hoe effectief de bestrijding van uitkeringsfraude was. Hierbij speelde een interessant fenomeen. Het onderzoeken van mogelijke fraude kost de instantie geld, maar het vinden van fraudeurs levert daarentegen direct geld op. En dus ging men op zoek naar de optimale verhouding tussen het […]
A kind invitation from Capgemini’s Function Point Analysis (FPA) core team lead me to do a presentation on smart use cases, agile software development, Scrum, Smart, enterprise agile, and software estimation using smart use cases for the core team, at the Capgemini offices in Papendorp, Utrecht. Example smart use case estimation workshop in Mumbai, India It turned out to be […]
On November 29 I will be doing a series of three lectures for the IT audit program at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, introducing the students to the processes, concepts and techniques of software development, as they will most likely be auditing (software development) projects later during their career. During the third and last lecture I will try to explain […]
On November 29 I will be doing a series of three lectures for the IT audit program at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, introducing the students to the processes, concepts and techniques of software development, as they will most likely be auditing (software development) projects later during their career. During the second lecture I will address a variety of analysis […]
On November 29 I will be doing a series of three lectures for the IT audit program at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, introducing the students to the processes, concepts and techniques of software development, as they will most likely be auditing (software development) projects later during their career. During the first lecture I will go through the history of […]
[Two day hands-on workshop at IT Works, Hotel Crowne Plaza, Antwerp. ] On November 25 and 26 I will present the 32th edition of an intense two-day workshop on the pragmatic use of UML modeling techniques (and beyond) with lots of hands-on exercises. Participants modeling activity diagrams with smart use cases During this workshops we will go through the following […]
[One day seminar on agile software development for Array Seminars in Hotel Lapershoek in Hilversum] During this intensive one day seminar Belgian guest speaker Stefaan van Royen and I cover a wide range of subjects on agile software development. Guest speaker Stefaan van Royen (TomTom) The following subjects where on the program: Why waterfall won’t work. Agile manifesto. Agile key […]
[Session ARC205 at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin] Use cases have been around for many years describing the requirements of software development projects. From a developer’s point of view, use cases are often seen as too abstract and too complex to develop code from. Until now, that is. During this interactive talk, speaker Sander Hoogendoorn will demonstrate how to […]
[Session ARC203-IS at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin] When it comes to Microsoft .NET-connected development, more and more frameworks are entering the market, both from Microsoft and from open source. Think of ASP.NET MVC, Castle, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Entity Framework, Unity, Linq2SQL, ADO.NET Data Services, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), nHibernate, Spring.NET, CSLA, NUnit, Enterprise Library, MEF or ADF. […]
[Session ARC202 at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin] When it comes to Microsoft .NET-connected development, more and more frameworks are entering the market, both from Microsoft and from open source. Think of ASP.NET MVC, Castle, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Entity Framework, Unity, Linq2SQL, ADO.NET Data Services, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), nHibernate, Spring.NET, CSLA, NUnit, Enterprise Library, MEF or ADF. […]
[Session ARC203 at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin] When it comes to Microsoft .NET-connected development, more and more frameworks are entering the market, both from Microsoft and from open source. Think of ASP.NET MVC, Castle, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Entity Framework, Unity, Linq2SQL, ADO.NET Data Services, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), nHibernate, Spring.NET, CSLA, NUnit, Enterprise Library, MEF or ADF. […]
On November 5 I will do a guest lecture at the Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (HAN) in Arnhem from 15:00 to 17:00. This talk is the extended version of one of the talks I will do the week after at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin.
To cut to the chase, those of you who have worked on enterprise or service oriented projects before already know this. These types of projects are characterized by a large number of organizational, functional and technically complicating factors. Enterprise software development projects are surrounded by a large number of complicating characteristics and challenges: Many different stakeholders. Projects have many different […]
As agile is becoming more and more mainstream, organization are starting to do enterprise software development project using well-known but fairly basic lightweight agile processes. In many projects this has lead to surprisingly bad result, baffling the agile Certified Pokémon Trainers who are coaching these projects. The presentation below shows a number of accelerators or technique that projects can […]
Vorige week gaf ik – voor de zoveelste keer – training in het identificeren en modelleren van smart use cases. Dit keer bevond ik me in de hippe ruimtes van Meeting Plaza Utrecht, boven het altijd sfeervolle Hoog Catharijne. Tijdens de goed verzorgde lunch werd het onderwerp al snel bepaald door de uiterste houdbaarheidsdatum. Van levensmiddelen, maar meer nog, van […]
Extension methods are a powerful feature in .NET, and have been increasingly adopted by the developer community. Also, LINQ and other framework features rely heavily on extension methods. In fact, extension methods were originally invented to be able to implement LINQ without having to change a lot of .NET framework base classes. Basically, an extension method is implemented as a […]
Sometimes there’s these really little things that hardly seem worth the effect blogging about. But when you start googling for the apparent solution, there’s a million-and-one blogs, forum questions that at the least are contradicting. In this particular case I wanted to set different images in different rows in a Repeater or GridView depending on some property of the domain […]
Last week, the Microsoft TechEd North America 2010 took place in the great city of New Orleans. I was lucky to be invited to do a talk on how frameworks can kill your projects. When it comes to Microsoft .NET-connected development, more and more frameworks enter the market. Both from Microsoft and from open source. Think of ASP.NET MVC, Castle, […]
Every now and then you see really horrible examples of software development. While I was try to scan a document using my printer/scanner, the software by HP failed miserable. Being the nice customer I am, when HP invited me to fill in an enquiry about the quality of their service. The form presented to fill in my feedback was simply […]
It’s a mildly sunny April morning in 2002 when I park my car outside of a huge government agency office in a small suburban city near Utrecht. I am invited for a brainstorm session with the agency’s enterprise architects. Although I do not consider myself an enterprise architect, and explained that upfront, they were eager to discuss their architecture with […]
Suppose you are in the IT department of a (very) large organization and have been developing systems for your organization for quite some years. Chances are that you will have a landscape of systems great and small that all serve a particular purpose, or that have served a particular purpose. Systems that were built in a variety of languages, such […]
This post was originally published in .NET Magazine. I re-posted it because of the talk I did at Microsoft’s DevDays 2010 in Den Haag recently. The slides for this talk can be downloaded here. As you’re probably have been made aware of in abundance, in .Net 3.5 Microsoft introduced a little language feature called LINQ. Although LINQ has been demonstrated […]
Let’s suppose for a moment that it’ is 1986. And let’s suppose you are starting a new company. A company that sells products or services to customers, as most companies do. Let’s say you selling (surf) board wear. You start selling your first t-shirts and you decide that you need to automate stuff. So you create a list of your […]
Despite misunderstanding and resistance of his space-flight loving people president Barack Obama recently aborted the Constellation space program. The Constellation program targets at putting humans on the moon again, for the first time since 1972, with the ultimate goal of possibly planning a manned trip to Mars in 2025. Although I had never heard of the program, after reading the […]
Again doing a lot of talks this spring on a wide range of subjects, from new technology, via enterprise agile to model driven development, but also about smart use cases, domain driven design, UML, and software architectures, design patterns, frameworks and .NET. This season’s highlights? Not a difficult choice: doing talks both at Microsoft DevDays and TechEd North America is […]
Smart use cases are a great technique for specifying standardized requirements in many types of projects. Over the past few years we have smart use cases being modeled and written in projects using Java and .NET, as you might expect, but also in Sharepoint projects, business intelligence, service oriented projects and even SAP implementations. Stereotypes drive standardization Standardization of your […]
The Accelerated Delivery Platform’s (ADP) Agile Dashboard is a pragmatic and publicly available tool (free) for managing project progress online. The Agile Dashboard was originally intended to manage progress for our agile projects, but these day it is used in a much broader perspective. As the ADP Core Team receives a lot of questions about it, it’s time to present […]
Agile – in all it’s variations – becomes an increasingly popular process for realizing software. The roles testers and testing plays in these projects is challenging and new. Testers are no longer considered code-killers, but can play – and are expected to play – a very pro-active role in agile projects. Although all agile process agree on the importance of […]
Last week my daughter Sam (13), her friend Joey and I went to see the movie Avatar in 3D at the IMAX theatre in Rotterdam. Following up on the hype and reading reviews I just got curious. Especially after reading an interview with director James Cameron, who previously directed Aliens and Titanic. Being more than interested in model driven software […]
As you might have heard from me before (endlessly), smart use cases are a fairly straightforward reqirements technique that we have introduced in many different types of projects, such as Java, .NET, BI, SOA, SAP projects. At times I receive question on smart use cases in projects, this time from Ron Kersic of Capgemini. See Ron’s original Dutch statement below. […]
As you might have heard from me before (endlessly), smart use cases are a fairly straightforward reqirements technique that we have introduced in many different types of projects, such as Java, .NET, BI projects apply smart use cases, but also in service oriented projects, where smart use cases where used to model the front end and also the services and […]
As you might have heard from me before (endlessly), smart use cases are a fairly straightforward reqirements technique that we have introduced in many different types of projects. Of course, Java, .NET, BI projects apply smart use cases, but this year I have also been involved in service oriented projects, where smart use cases where used to model not only […]
Customer presentation, Eindhoven. After Twan van den Broek (of Ciber) and I succesfully applied a great mix of agile software development processes and techniques, including Scrum, Smart, smart use cases, smart estimation in probably the first agile SAP SOA projects in the Netherlands, we’ve held several talks on the subject at conferences and seminars, including an agile conference, the SOA […]
Earlier this week I attended the Landelijk Architectuur Congres in Nieuwegein. Besides the noteworthy percentage of attendees with mustaches, grey hair and ties, a pleasant and friendly event. In the afternoon of the first day of the event I did a lively talk on shaping service oriented projects using smart use cases. During the talk I recevied some very peculiar […]