Tools don't solve problems, thinking does
After having promoted agile and iterative approaches to software development projects for over a decade, I finally find that, like Bob Dylan says, the times they are a-changing. And for the better. Many small and large organizations and enterprises are now turning towards agile approaches, often to compensate for years and years of failing projects. You might suggest that all’s […]
In any given system under development, the business domain of that system is key. It holds all concepts important to the domain, and captures the business logic from the domain. An important question to answer is what to model about the objects in that domain and how to model this in UML class diagrams. Identifying the elements of the business […]
[Presentation for Capgemini Knowledge Management Worldwide, via LiveMeeting] A while ago I received a very kind invitation to address the Capgemini Global Knowledge Community on a subject of my choice concerning reuse. It said: “On behalf of FS GBU KM, I would like to invite you to deliver a brief talk on a topic of your choice in Knowledge Management. […]
[Talk at Capgemini Microsoft TechEd, at Papendorp, Utrecht] Again due to illness of one of the speakers, I got to do an additional session at Capgemini Microsoft TechEd, after doing a keynote and a talk the week before. This time I demonstrated our approach to model driven development using smart use cases, domain driven design and Tobago MDA. Here’s the […]
Enterprise Architect by Sparx Systems is a commonly used modeling tool, targeted at modeling UML and BPMN diagrams. One of the most frequently used diagrams is the use case diagram. A use case diagram consists mainly of actors and use cases, either traditional or smart use cases. Use case scenarios There’s different ways of modeling and describing what action a […]
Enterprise Architect by Sparx Systems is a commonly used modeling tool, targeted at modeling UML and BPMN diagrams. One of the most frequently used diagrams is the use case diagram. A use case diagram consists mainly of actors and use cases, either traditional or smart use cases. A use case template The specification of the individual use cases in the […]
Will present keynote and some sessions at Centric internal event on agile software development, targeted at project managers, information and business analysts. This talk specifically targets at the role of information analysis and requirements in agile projects. Topics will include: Does business and information analysis still exist in agile projects? Agile requirements Where does the backlog come from? An agile […]
Will present keynote and some sessions at Centric internal event on agile software development, targeted at project managers, information and business analysts. Topics will include: Why doesn’t waterfall work – and did it ever? What makes agile different? The Agile methodology that doesn’t exist. An overview of agile processes that do exist. Agile key characteristics Agile best practices Agile beyond […]
An important and often underestimated aspect in organizing agile projects is the contract between the client and the contractor. Getting the contract right is much harder than it seems. Venue: Presentation and discussion for legal department at Capgemini, Papendorp, Utrecht. Reasons for getting into contract disputes have to with that it is very hard to establish upfront what it is […]
Not all agile processes and approaches recognize the role of testing explicitly, other than stressing the importance of unit testing. However in short iterative projects, testing is key from day one. On of the agile approaches that does explicitly describes the role of testing – and of having testers on-board – is the agile process Smart. One of the characteristics […]
We are working very on implementing a new version of our free online agile dashboard. It is implemented in ASP.NET and C# and will allow you to manage your own (agile) projects, based on your own work item types, statuses and estimation scale. We hope to deploy a very first alpha version of the Agile Dashboard soon. It will become […]
One of the major items on my wish list – that is on the professional half of it – is to write a book that displays my ideas on software architecture, patterns and frameworks. Yes I know, there are many books on software architecture, and there are many books that explain patterns, and yes there also are a lot of […]
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 […]
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 […]
[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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
New entry " Weekly digest of week 53 2009 / 2010: A happy 2010 for you all! Thi.. http://bit.ly/8TNPq5 " on Capping IT Off. # Pfff. Took me 1/2 day but restored connection to VPN again. Cisco AnyConnect 2.3 does not work on Windows 7. So back to previous utility. # Uninstalled Cisco VPN Client 5.0.3 and installed Cisco VPN […]
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 […]
Unsubscribed from Dr. Dobbs Journal. There's too much information to read anyway in the field of software development. # New entry " Weekly digest of week 52 2009: In the last digest of 2009: A look a.. http://bit.ly/4rsmWg " on Capping IT Off. # New entry " Avatar, reuse and model driven software development: Last week my.. http://bit.ly/5StRd0 " on […]
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 […]
RT @smartusecases. Smart Use Cases FAQ http://bit.ly/53pc9c # The 3 stages of owning a computer. http://htxt.it/OGjn # New entry " Questions on smart use cases. Part III – Stereotypes and minimal us.. http://bit.ly/7XwfdJ " on Capping IT Off. # Spent the morning looking at reusables from our distributed agile .NET projects. Discussed framework upgrades and smart use case metrics. # […]