The Four Process Phases

I’ve previously written down the system development process for students to use from the high level. This post will break things down into each section of the four sections of cycle (discover, define, develop, and deliver) with some ideas of what should be proposed for each of them. Discover Starting with ‘discover’ is where the

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CodeRetreat Aberdeen review

Steven Milne and I ran the first CodeRetreat in Aberdeen on 21 April and a little under twenty people turned up on the day. Adrian Mowat from EdgeCaseUK facilitated the event for us and kept everythign moving along smoothly. Adrian ran the traditional CodeRetreat format and had everyone coding in pairs to develop Conways’ Game

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Project based MSc Advanced Computing Science

I’m trying to find out if there would be any interest in a degree where you mainly ‘do the work’ and learn through discussion with fellow students and mentoring staff, who can guide you to what you need to know. There would be no exams on this degree and it would all be done via

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The Aberdeen Software Factory completed its first year

The Aberdeen Software Factory is now about a year old. I was running events under this title for longer, but about a year ago we put the paperwork in place to take paid consultancy work. As an ongoing means to find work for students, both paid and unpaid, the ASF did fine. We had three

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Thinking about Lego Serious Play and Simplex

For the last year or so I’ve been looking on and off at Lego Serious Play (LSP). I’ve been thinking about two aspects of LSP. First, I’ve been wondering how I could bring it into my university classroom with students. Second, I think it could be a useful addition to the range of skills available

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National Hack the Government Day – Aberdeen

Come to the event at the University of Aberdeen and use open data to make government work better for you. Come and meet other students, developers,  and designers to develop useful apps to make life easier using data that’s produced by the government at local, regional or national levels. We’re holding a remote version of the

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Aberdeen Software Factory is a ‘go’

The university has approved the idea of a software shop run by students with me as manager for the projects they do. I thought this would be a struggle to start up, but they just said ‘Yes, it’s a good idea. Let’s do it.’ I didn’t have to use any of the arguments I had

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Failure Demand at TechMeetup

I did a talk at TechMeetup Aberdeen last week on Failure Demand. You can find the slides on my Interests page, or watch the video when it’s up on the TechMeeup blog site. The basics of Failure demand can be found in a a blog entry by David Joyce, and one of John Seddon’s blog

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Software house starts

The student software factory is up and running. It’s on a volunteer basis with about four or five students meeting twice a week for about two hours each session. Some of them do a bit on the projects outside of this time, but not a great deal as they still have other committments for coursework,

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Industrial Experience at Leeds, Kent and Sheffield

While at the University of Kent in Cantebury last week for the HEA-ICS conference I had a chance to discuss some of the other programmes that offer students places in software houses either as part of their undergraduate programme, or as an extra job for which they need to apply for a place. At Kent

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