If you’ve had a chance to flip through our white paper Our Agile Development Process: A Customer’s Guide to Scrum, you might be wondering how to write eye-catching user stories that will make a strong impression on the development team. To help you get started, we’ve put together 5 tips for writing user stories that [...]
5 Tips for Writing Unforgettable User Stories
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August 19, 2010
5 Tips for Competing with a Lean Development Firm
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July 9, 2010
After reading our white paper “Lean Software Development: Cutting Fat Out of Your Diet”, you probably understand the competitive advantage that a hardworking software development firm derives from applying lean principles. In the spirit of friendly competition, we’ve come up with 5 tips to help firms that are still plodding along with traditional software development [...]
Custom Software DIY Essentials
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June 30, 2010
We realize that after reading our white paper “Crush Your Competitors with Custom Software” some readers might be so enthusiastic about the benefits of tailor-made software that they’d like to take a do-it-yourself approach. We say, go for it! Aside from training, experience, software engineering know-how, office space, computer hardware, software applications, and a multidisciplinary [...]
Making a Case for Sloppy Software Development
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June 29, 2010
Although our white paper, “Proper Software Engineering: An Executive Primer”, takes a strong stand in favour of software development that’s guided by best practices and sound methodologies, we acknowledge that there are two sides to every coin. It’s all a matter of how you perceive value. Admittedly, we have strong opinions about proper software engineering, [...]
Top Ten Ways to Torpedo Your Software Project
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June 23, 2010
In our white paper The Software Reality Check: Diagnosing Software Projects in Crisis, we describe some of the symptoms and causes of failure in software projects, and explain the process we use to diagnose troubled projects. No doubt, the paper provokes well-intentioned readers to reflect on the health of their own software projects and ask [...]
5 Exceptions to the Agile Rule
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June 21, 2010
After reading our white paper “Agile Software Development: A Smart Choice for Outsourced Projects”, you may have come away with the impression that Agile is the best thing since sliced bread. We certainly think so. Here’s a humorous look at a list of 5 situations where Agile should not be used to develop software.
Test Deficit Disorder: A Silent Killer of Software
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June 2, 2010
TDD is a serious problem. An outbreak of this uniquely degenerative disease can have a debilitating effect. In fact, it often proves deadly to software applications. A development team infected with Test Deficit Disorder exhibits a marked aversion to testing their software. Often, they put off testing to the last possible moment, and then rush [...]
Agile People Are…
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May 22, 2010
All experienced software professionals know that it is people, not technology, not process that builds great solutions. This is something that is core to our culture at Architech. We live it, we breathe it, and write about it… Great Team, Great Software. Agile as a methodology, a mind-set, a philosophy is based on this fundamental [...]
5 Ways to Build Great Software Without Involving Any People
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April 28, 2010
In case you haven’t checked lately, there’s no Make Great Software button on your computer keyboard. And even if there was, it wouldn’t work anyway because software is all about people, right? It takes people to understand the needs of other people. It also takes people to address those needs with appropriate solutions. Or does [...]
Sprint 0 + Why?
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April 2, 2010
Pam (one of our Scrum Masters) and I were having a chat about this over lunch yesterday… apparently the sprint 0 concept has been bandied around the Agile community so the concept itself, even the terminology, is not foreign… When I was thinking about sprint 0 there were several motivations. Architecture in Scrum is almost non-existent. This is [...]