We are a strong believer of Agile approaches. These techniques allow us to deliver enterprise applications despite smaller team sizes. By promoting monthly releases, we are able to work more efficiently by quickly adapting to the changing needs of our client/market.

We are also religious in implementing unit tests on business layer codes. By doing so, we save time during regression testing when the computer does the testing work instead of the traditional manual QC testing.

We also apply continuous integration. Our build server is designed to create builds at any point in time so we get latest codes out for testing almost every day.

Here’s a graphical view of our methodology:

How do stand-up meetings help? Are they really helpful?

Here at Ideyatech, we have been practicing stand-up meetings religiously ever since our first project. So far, this short, daily routine has kept everyone up-to-date on status of their projects. By reporting daily activities, issues and bottlenecks are quickly identified and resolved. Everyone gets accountability on the tasks that are reported, and the team becomes more responsible of the project as a whole.

Here are some tips to make stand-up meetings effective:

As defined in Wikipedia:

Agile Software Development is a conceptual framework for software development that promotes development iterations, open collaboration, and adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project.

True to its meaning, Agile is a concept that can be implemented in several ways. So, there is no correct way of getting it right… Nevertheless, here are some tips we’d like to share based on our experience:

I’ve recently come across unfuddle(http://www.unfuddle.com) which is a project tracking tool and hosted source repository. This site is built on RoR and behaves similar with Basecamp. I’m currently using Basecamp for my projects… it’s pretty good but I find it a little too limited for other things such as defect and issue tracking. Currently, I [...]

We have seen successful roll-out of Just-In-Time concept in manufacturing. This technique was popularized by Toyota with their car manufacturing process. With proper coordination, they are able to adjust their production line easily when certain demand increases. For example, if report shows increase in demand on a specific model or color, they call their suppliers [...]

Here are some tips that you may find useful when preparing project plans.

Identify business need and project objectives. Ensure that there is a business need, and how the project fulfills that need is clear. This will get your project higher priority and better visibility. This will also guide you and your business analysts when [...]

Status reporting is an important function needed to be performed in any project. It is the primary tool used by project managers to communicate with their clients and stakeholders. Creating status reports may be a simple task, however, preparing one with valuable information takes some management skills and process maturity.
Here are some points to be [...]

Outsourcing helps your business by allowing it to focus its energies and resources on its core strengths. However, the success of outsourcing depends on a lot of factors, the top of which comes from you, the party that decides on whether outsourcing will actually help you achieve your business goals.

Why I Choose Ivy?

The main thing I like about Ivy is its simplicity. You can use Ivy with only ant installed on your system (and of course, java). This means that you don’t need to download any Ivy related libraries or when using eclipse, no plug-in is needed. You can run everything using ant, from installing the ivy library to downloading the dependencies.

Like most of us often hear, “its another framework or dependency management tool”. But what exactly differentiates Ivy from Maven?

Ivy is much easier to use. The library is simpler since it doesn’t do so much. It only focuses on dependency management and use the already famous and powerful ant to build the application. In short, ant and ivy is used side by side.

We’ve been using Continuum for quite some time now. While Continuum does seem to do a good job managing our builds, its limited support for JUnit Test reports made us evaluate an alternative, Hudson. Hudson is the new guy on the block, aside from cool icons and more intuitive interface, this tool seems to be quite competitive and feature-packed.

So, I’m listing down a head-to-head comparison between Continuum and Hudson as we’ve used them and based on features we are looking for:

As recommended by Yahoo on YSlow - tip #1: Make fewer HTTP request and tip #10: Minify javascript- we aim to implement these tips on all our projects with minimal head-ache. While these recommendations are truly useful, implementing them can be quite tedious and challenging. Consider having to maintain multiple min versions of the javascript and the files that links to them! So to alleviate the problem, we created a tool called low-tides (as part of open-tides) that helps automate the merging and minification of css and js files.

As defined in Wikipedia:

Agile Software Development is a conceptual framework for software development that promotes development iterations, open collaboration, and adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project.

True to its meaning, Agile is a concept that can be implemented in several ways. So, there is no correct way of getting it right… Nevertheless, here are some tips we’d like to share based on our experience:

Elegance in Approach
Another form of art in programming is the approach or architectural design. This topic requires strong technical background and experience, but still, designing your architecture requires artistic skills. There are many ways to skin a cat, so is there to design an architecture. Although design patterns help standardize approaches in software programming, decisions [...]

Many conceive that programming is a science of computational logic but that’s only half the truth. Programming is more than science, it’s an art. If you disagree, then you’re as good as someone fresh out of college - brainwashed on algorithms, computational complexity, and neural networks.
Let’s begin by putting things in proper context. Art, as [...]

I’ve recently come across unfuddle(http://www.unfuddle.com) which is a project tracking tool and hosted source repository. This site is built on RoR and behaves similar with Basecamp. I’m currently using Basecamp for my projects… it’s pretty good but I find it a little too limited for other things such as defect and issue tracking. Currently, I [...]

After setting up Continuum, I find it reasonably good to support continuous integration (for a free/open-source solution).The package for download is ready to run and easy to configure. This supports Agile development, quick-turn around. Initially, I was skeptic setting up this tool considering it may take me 3-5 days to setup. Well, I was wrong… [...]

An important consideration with web site design is navigation. Users and prospective customers who visit your site would want to easily find their way around, or else they leave. If you have an online business, you would want to generate as much traffic to your website as possible and make as many sales. However, this [...]