I’ve been studying with the Open University now for six years; the first three years studying at undergraduate level, and the past three years at postgraduate level. Over this time I have developed what I feel is quite a nice system for tackling the Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs) that OU students regularly complete, so I thought …
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The latest episode of Software Engineering Radio contains an interesting discussion about a project management technique known as Developer Anarchy. Fred George, the interviewee, defines anarchy as a group of people managing themselves, with few or no rules being imposed by higher levels of management. George describes how he first discovered this technique when working …
Organisational structure In his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks claimed that adding more people to a late software project would make it even later. His reasoning behind this claim, which has now become known as Brooks’ Law, was that people in a team need to communicate with each other. As the team grows …
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The pattern I like the idea of holding a daily stand-up meeting. This involves a team coming together at the start of each day to provide brief status updates and discuss the challenges ahead. I see stand-ups as being particularly useful in helping to resolve issues that are blocking progress, such as in this fictional …
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A personal perspective The first time I came across an error message telling me “oops, something has gone wrong…” was when I installed the LinkedIn app on my Windows Phone back in 2013. After a little research, I discovered that what this particularly unhelpful message was trying to tell me was that the time on …
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The power and perils of OBD-II In 2010, the Centre for Automotive Embedded Systems Security demonstrated the devastating consequences that could arise should malicious attackers gain access to the on-board diagnostics port (OBD-II) that has been fitted to most vehicles since the mid 1990s. This collaborative group of academic researchers from the University of California San Diego and …