Category: Software Engineering
Earned Value
Are we there yet? Anyone with kids has probably heard this during a long car trip. Anyone in the software industry has probably heard this too. Software development projects can be huge investments of time and energy, and often weeks can go by without showing a lot of return on that investment. We often try…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: Framework for Structured Critical Thinking
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 2: Story/Task Decomposition and Estimation as Design
In my first post of this series, I discussed how ambiguity and lack of shared understanding between members of a product development team can occur when we rely on unstructured, ad hoc, and abstract communication processes (i.e., conversations and high-level user stories) for expressing our thoughts and ideas. We feel like we are painting a…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 1
I was recently re-introduced to one of my favorite essays, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, by Leslie Lamport. Leslie is one of several thought leaders within our industry who I really admire, both for his insights into the nature of software design as well as for his contributions in terms of…
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Quick Look – AWS Cognito
Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes many common cloud services easy to create and maintain. One of the many AWS services really makes easy is supporting authentication. One of them, Cognito, is a platform for authentication within the cloud. Let’s walk through how to use Cognito along with AWS’s Amplify service to create an Angular application…
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Web Development – Executive Summary
Web development often involves a few components. First is developing the markup (HTML) that runs in a web browser. Second is developing the application style, which is often done using CSS. Third is some client-side application logic, possibly written in JavaScript. Fourth is a backend running on a server somewhere. One interesting aspect of web…
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Continuous Integration – Executive Summary
Continuous Integration (CI) is a strange concept from the perspective of an outsider. Some of our topics in software development make sense from the outside. Unit tests imply we are adding some value to our development process. Requirement gathering makes sense to almost anyone. But the concept of Continuous Integration seems a little bit like…
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Creating a Progressive Web Application with Angular
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are kind of the new hotness right now. Lots of chatter, but most probably can’t even spell PWA. 😉 PWAs are an attempt to create applications that live in the web browser and behave like real applications. Let’s take our Angular HTTP Call example and make it into a PWA. To…
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Quick Look – Angular Async / Await
These days, Async / Await is old hat for most C# developers. Using it in C# land makes async programming almost as readable as synchronous code. What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code? Quite frankly, you can read synchronous code and asynchronous code, but it is kind of a mess. With asynchronous code,…
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Our Top Posts of 2018
As we near the end of another year, it’s time to look back at what our team has contributed to the Don’t Panic Labs blog. Usually, we just cover what was published on our blog, but 2018 saw the launch of Doug Durham’s own site and blog. In late September, he began a three-part series…
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