RB Consulting's Blog

Importance of code reviews

Richie — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:38:11 +0000

Irrespective of how a project is managed, when an application is released and rolled-out, there can be a nagging question as to whether the application is performing efficiently. In any project, time pressures can force corners to be cut and short-cuts to be taken. At the end of day, if the features are operational and available, things must be ok – mustn't they ? In projects based on agile principles, code refactoring can be included, whereby the underlying code of an application's functionality is reviewed and updated where necessary to make improvements to how an application operates. A proper and regular code review process helps to ensure that technical debt doesn't build up in an application.

CAP is important when designing cloud applications

Richie — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:30:39 +0000

Whether you're moving an existing application to the cloud or starting afresh on the cloud with a brand new application, CAP is an important topic to consider when (re)designing the architecture of your app. CAP stands for Consistency, Availability and Partitioning, three characteristics that are key when designing a distributed application. These three characterictics have an important bearing on the capability of your application to scale up or down with no negative impact which is a basic requirement for cloud based applications. To sum up, CAP is an important part of any systems architecture – be it on the cloud, hosted or on-premises and the overall objective is to find and design the appropriate balance between the three requirements for your application.

US Governments intent to use cloud computing

Richie — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:55:43 +0000

In summary, this intent has been shown by the following; The US Government has signalled a clear intention to use cloud computing services. This intention was first signalled with the release of apps.gov - a US Government portal to allow different cloud service vendor to market their offerings to the government sector and to provide information on cloud computing A 'cloud first' policy is being adopted by Federal Government. This means in effect that provided security, reliability and cost-effectiveness criteria are met, Federal agencies should use cloud based services as a default. Considering that the US Government spends $80m each year on IT related expenditure, this could be a huge investment in the Cloud.

Scrum and Kanban – the agile way

Richie — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 11:30:54 +0000

Within the umbrella of agile practices, people enquire about the scrum methodology and the kanban technique as regards their similarities, their differences and potential benefits using one over the other. This blog looks at the characteristics of each, potential scenarios where one or both could be used to best advantage and finishes with a video of Jean Tabaka providing her perspective on both methodologies.

Web security Oauth or OpenID

Richie — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:30:02 +0000

There has been a lot of online talk about Oauth and OpenID, what they contribute to website / applications security, how they differ and/or are similar. I would like to show how they can jointly contribute to increased security for a website or application. To put a context on this blog, I refer to a previous blog that I wrote on Building in security to websites and apps, where I discussed a selection of OWASP principles of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Within the scope of OWASP's availability principle, authorisation and authentication are important and are closely related. OpenID is every much in the authentication area, while Oauth is in the authorisation space.

Agile and user centred design working together

Richie — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:41:43 +0000

In my own experience and from reading various blogs, questions on the compatibility and possible conflicts between user centred design and agile principles get raised. As an advocate of both sets of principles, I think they are compatible and can influence the likely success of a project. In this blog I set my responses to some of the questions raised.

Whats your IT strategy portfolio

Richie — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:30:42 +0000

In a previous blog, I wrote about how to create an effective ICT strategy by creating a synergy between the business oriented IS strategy and the technical oriented IT strategy.Both strategies are linked and the progress of both are jointly assessed and measured through relevant kpis. Synergy between IS strategy and IT strategyThis 'linkage' will also allow for changes to the IT strategy in order to adapt to changes in the IS strategy driven by the business environment. To further facilitate the delivery of the IT strategy, it is helpful to view the strategy 'financially' as an investment portfolio. As the progress of the IT strategy is reviewed, the related kpi's are assessed and with changes in the IS strategy, it may be decided to alter the relative proportions within the portfolio.

Self organisation a key ingredient for scrum

Richie — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:15:05 +0000

One of the principles of the Scrum approach to agile development and project management is self-organisation. The benefit(s) that occur when a team self-organises include improved performance and creativity within the team. I have decided in this blog to use two video clips which discuss the principles of self-organisation, how to roll it out in an organisation and some differences with traditional project management.

Technical debt can be managed

Richie — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:14:35 +0000

Technical debt is a metaphor that refers to the consequences of allowing low quality software coding to go unchanged. Ward Cunningham, one of the pioneers of extreme programming, coined the phrase to convey the potential risks of taking short-cuts when developing and testing code for an application. Ward's first law states that lowering code quality lengthens development time. Whatever the form, the negative impact of technical debt on your development team decreases their throughput. get out of this spiral, strong executive sponsorship is needed.

Dont disturb me scrum at work

Richie — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:00:46 +0000

The scrum process provides for planning at different phases of a project to enable the delivery team and product owner, facilitated by the scrummaster to define product features with user stories and related definition(s) of 'done' for each sprint. With this in hand, the delivery team can achieve momentum to deliver working software with no interference. There is no one solution to rolling out scrum in an organisation. This is understandable as each organisation has its own unique characteristics and challenges. As scrum seeks to complete a project over a series of sprints; organisations can borrow these principles to implement scrum over a series of iterations. Win-win all round.