IT Shopkeeping

The first publication in my QuickNotes series is  Agile Development in .NET.  Most Agile methodologies used in .NET shops nationwide are variations of Scrum and Extreme Programming(XP). This booklet covers these tools and techniques: Test-driven Development (TDD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Refactoring to Patterns.  The QuickNotes series covers relevant topics in software development to provide the reader with a swift overview of important trends, terms, and concepts.  This book is available at Amazon.com.

We bring our phones to work now and use them for everything.  Facebook, Candy Crush, and Twitter are a great use of a smartphone but these devices are also helping us become more productive: email, file and document handling and editing, as well as contacts, calendars and integration with sales, financial, and other third-party business apps.  This creates two things:  opportunity and challenge.  We want to seize upon the opportunity of best utilizing these devices to do our jobs while addressing the challenge of the resulting exposure of company data …

When it comes to native mobile development, .NET shops are in a pickle.    Mobile and tablet use is estimated to make up 90% of new device adoption by 2015 (Gartner).  Steve Jobs saw this coming and had this to say:
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm, but as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular.

So they just don’t get it?  Here’s what to do.  Miscommunication usually boils down to this: someone wants someone to do something they either don’t want to do or something they don’t understand.  Here are three ways to fix it:

Pragmatic Programmers’ Ship It! by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney(2006) still hasn’t gone out of style. It lays an Software Shop 101, 202 foundation that’s extensible by the modern flavors of Agile, Scrum, etc.    The upshot: