Main topic of today is using Agile in an FDA regulated medical device context. Sounds like an impossibility I know, but the folks from Agiletek and Abbott presented a very interesting case study on how they did it. They started off by presenting “the way it used to work”, highlighting an older product development cycle from the 1990s that had very strictly defined dev phases, including a 10-12 week integration cycle – yikes! When they decided to implement Agile on a more recent project they broke up their 3-5 year dev cycle in 6 week
Read More »Busy day 3 with a number of sessions. We attended: Strategies for Replacing Systems in Agile Projects, How to Evolve a Product Backlog, Agile Metrics and Four Core Concepts for Fast User Feedback. In the discussion for Replacing Systems I certainly got surprised by one of the strategies. The first release of the replaced system should be inferior to the existing system. At first I thought Niklas was crazy but this started to make sense when he describes that there are infinite ways to compensate users and make it balance out. The next session
Read More »Agile Product Management and a lively talk about modern software development by Alistair Cockburn were the themes of the day. The day started off with a hotel breakfast buffet at 6:30. One thing I rarely miss when I travel is a good breakfast to start the day. My speaking opportunity was, um, unique. Basically a bunch of stages set up around all the food. Oh, and also starting at 7:45 AM. I was able to rush through my presentation and still answer a few questions. Next was the keynote speaker, Alistair Cockburn. He arrived in
Read More »Good start to the Agile 2009 show… seems bigger than last year and well organized so far. Interesting, we’re seeing lots of people from safety-critical shops – medical devices, telecom, military & aerospace, etc. Anecdotally seems like a big change from last year. Todd attended an Agile in safety critical talk that was a good general overview of why Agile is better than traditional development methods for these shops, but lacked specifics on how, why, etc. There’s an FDA & Agile presentation later in the week which will present an actual medical device case study
Read More »Off to Agile 2009 next week in Chicago where Klocwork will be both attending and exhibiting at the conference. We’ll blog throughout the week to keep people updated and let you know the latest. There are a few sessions in particular that we’ll be sure to report on and let readers know anything useful we learned (or not): Adopting Agile in an FDA Regulated Environment Java and Ruby Tools for Code Quality Effective Code Reviews in Agile Teams Zen and the Art of Software Quality Scrum and CMMI – from Good to Great Be sure
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Tom Johnson’s recent blog article (a must-read, involving ice picks and eyeballs) reminded me of one reason we want to move Klocwork’s user communication content to a Wiki: we want to talk to our users. Crazy idea! Let the doc team talk directly to the users? What stupid things might those literary types say? I confess that it’s taken me a long time to get to this point. Johnson says tech writers are often subject to figurative lobotomies, like “don’t bother the subject matter experts; they’re busy”, “don’t use your own voice on video tutorials”,
Read More »There I have said it. As a marketer, I am disappointed in my peers in their attempts to get their message in the hands of their audience. Over the past couple of weeks, I have attended a few webinars from other organizations selling software development tools that were truly atrocious. So here are a few pointers for my few marketers on webinars: Stop talking down to the audience – treating your prospects as unintelligent blobs is not the way to connect or be heard. These people are senior developers and engineering managers of Fortune 500 companies not kids coming out of school. Yes, there
Read More »Ever been faced with that glassy-eyed expression, the look of unthinking, unwholesome fear when some long, incomprehensible word escapes your geeky mouth and upsets the maiden aunts around the once-a-year, wear-your-best-tie, try-not-to-die-before-the-cake’s-all-gone tea table? OK, so this paper won’t help you in that situation whatsoever, but if you replace your maiden aunts with a bunch of your best geek friends, and replace the tea with a sturdy helping of Dew, knowing how a real whole program analysis solution works might just conceivably come in handy. Some day. “Dude, I was totally stoked when I read
Read More »Code hunters are spotting with greater frequency defective coding that could open security holes in free and open source (FOSS) software. The Open Source Report 2008 and the Architecture Library Report, conducted by Coverity for the U.S. Department Homeland Security Cybersecurity Open Source Hardening Project, shows more than 10,000 defects fixed since project launch in March 2006. The report, delivered in July at the OSCON 2009 (Open source Convention) gathering, used the same analysis tools and configurations as the Scan Benchmark 2006. The results are based on analysis of over 55 million lines of code
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