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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The second summer of client driven MSc group projects

Monday sees the start of the next iteration of the group projects with real-world clients that was started last summer. In many ways those projects worked ok. We delivered usable products to clients and we are still working with one of them in ongoing work. What didn’t work so well were the engineering aspects of

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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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Solution to fixed price projects

I  found the solution to pricing agile projects. It has been staring me in the face for ages. You see it mentioned by lots of people: Anderson, Gilb, Cohn, Poppendieck, etc. It’s obvious really when you think about it. However, it took Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James Trott to spell out the answer in

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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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EVO: Measurable Value in the Classroom

The other week as part of the summer conversion MSc group project preperations I took the Measurable Value case study by Ryan Shriver and turned it into a working example that the students needed to work through. This exercise worked, but could’ve been better. Ryan also gave me permission to make use of his example

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Still problems with software development

There is a new 2009 Chaos Report from the Standish Group. It still shows the poor success rate for software projects, and that many are still challenged with budget and delivery issues. Things are not any better since the 2006 Chaos Report either. They are somewhat better than the original 1994 (or at scribd) report

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Agile+Evo and Student Perceptions

As part of a module on the MSc Software Project Management programme I had my students write an essay comparing a work breakdown structure for the iteration of a project and the approach taken for ‘business value delivery’ described by Ryan Shriver in his Measurable Value with Agile article. This produced some interesting results amongst

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