We are happy campers today. Last night Valtech was awarded the prize for developing the best public service website, 1177.se at the EPiServer Awards in Sweden. We’re of course ecstatically happy for the great work done by our Swedish colleagues and wish them the best of luck in the continuing development. This is not the first time this website is awarded prizes, [...]

The NHS Information Centre (NHSIC) held a Hack week on the 10th -14th October. They invited suppliers with relevant experience within the industry along to highlight various problems that they will face when trying to accomplish their strategic vision for information – the Open Data Platform (ODP). The goal is to build an open, easily [...]

  Last Friday, David offered us an overview of the project inception phase within agile software development. David began by establishing the context of business-owned incremental delivery: business-owned, because the value proposition is determined by stakeholders outside IT; incremental, because there are often commercial opportunities to exploit by delivering ‘smaller and sooner’. When dealing with [...]

Agility is the ability to do what you need at the right time and to the right level of detail, to be able to analyse enough now to enable you to build something that works, which can be implemented preferably into production in order to gain the benefit you planned.        But how about [...]

It seems that Agile has grown up. That was certainly the message I received when I attended the Valtech Agile Edge event recently. The people attending were primarily from large enterprises and the public sector.  The type of attendee was not a surprise, given that target audience for the Agile Edge event is programme managers, [...]

A few months ago an article was published in Computer Weekly where corporate IT Lawyer Alistair Maughan, argues the case that Agile will not work in Government projects.  I didn’t see this article when it was first published, but it was brought to my attention when a colleague noticed that one of the comments arguing [...]

I feel enthused to blog about my current project, which is the first project I’ve ran where we have a dedicated UX expert on the team. For those of you who are not aware of the term UX, it stands for User eXperience. The UX expert will work closely with the customer and business analysts, [...]

Being an aspiring software craftsman goes way beyond than just saying it. I’ll quote my own definition of software craftsmanship from my previous post. Software craftsmanship is a long journey to mastery. It’s a lifestyle where developers choose to be…

Is software engineering the best approach for developing software? Does it apply for the majority of the software projects or just a very few of them?Software Engineering was an answer for the perceived “software crisis”, back in 1968, in the First NAT…

Our team is currently working with a client on a medium sized, medium complexity Java application which has quite low test coverage. We are introducing characterisation tests to snapshot functionality. These will give us the confidence to refactor away technical debt and extend the application without regression. One of the problems we are experiencing is [...]