Archive for the ‘Productivity’ category

My Daylite Touch for iPad case study

December 16th, 2010

I was involved in the Beta testing of Daylite Touch for the iPad and was invited to write a case study describing how my business benefits from using Daylite and Daylite Touch for iPad. Here’s the published case study.

Busy consultancy life, growing family, and blogging

October 28th, 2010

Just posting because i haven’t posted in months. This is just a post about the interesting balance (or potential lack of it) when running an IT consultancy.

It’s an odd one – business is booming; clients are a-plenty; clients are happy and all extending our working contracts; all is smooth and rosy. But, in this focus on business growth and client satisfaction, there’s little time to give to feeding back into the community: I’m not attending many events; i’m not blogging much; i’m not tweeting many interesting finds. I’m just working hard, making clients happy and getting paid.

I do know others in the community who focus very much on their relationships within the community, and more on sharing and expressing than on earning. I know others who have a dedicated focus on creating products for the future.

So, i have to say that mine is a short-termist view: Generate the revenue and deliver. Of course, along with that comes the creation of some great business relationships (clients and partners), but it’s highly in the present and focused.

So, in fairness, with my family’s desire to move into a much bigger house, i have to say that the business focus isn’t planning to shift within the next 6 months. After that, we’ll see. I definitely want to create a saleable product. Of that, i’m very sure.

More meaningful posts later…

Furthering the quest to *get* agile

April 15th, 2009

My academic learning focus has been a bit off recently, what with the amount of work i’ve had on. But, no excuses – my quest to grasp the academic history of agile delivery is taking steps forward, with my digging into DSDM. I’ve decided to focus on DSDM due to its UK-centricity, which I feel will have the greatest short term impact. I’ll get to SCRUM, XP, RUP, et al when i get to them.

I started the quest ages ago and have progressed it, but more in practice than in reading. Now’s the time for the reading to pick up again…

Now we’re rocking! DSL story driven development and testing in Java!

December 9th, 2008

At TechnoPhobia, we have an interesting challenge to implement a technology agnostic requirements capture process that (in my mind) will enable us, with very minimal effort, to repurpose these documented requirements into fully automated browser tests. I’m thinking that the process could look something like this:

  1. The project and client team write end-user functional requirements as User Stories and Scenarios
  2. The stories are stored as plain text in SVN or GIT and made immediately available to the development and test teams
  3. The development and test teams create a few executable padder files, wrapped around these stories, turning them into fully automatable browser tests
  4. The executable files are run, they read the stories and interact with the browser to determine if the stories successfully pass

Pretty cool, huh! No more massive team specific documents, just good old plain textual stories that are shared by all on the project, including the client.

Making this happen across multiple technologies

I am WAY TOO EXCITED to see an implementation in Java! This opens massive opportunity to progress with a technology agnostic approach. Now to find a suitable solution for .Net and perhaps PHP

Omnifocus – getting more beautiful by the day

December 2nd, 2008

I have many notes on my use of OmniFocus on mac and iPhone to GTD but none quite ready to post. But, if you your’re not Getting Things Done or are on a mac and are not using OmniFocus, perhaps you should! It’s lovely!