In a previous article, I wrote about the perils of software project planning using man hours and how story points solve the issue. More about it can be read here: Man Hour Don’t Work in Software Development TL;DR: Estimating things in man hours do not work in software development. There are better methologies such as Agile…buisteven.medium.com In this article, I’ll be describing the difficulty of moving from hour estimates to story points.

Scrumfall [skruhm-fawl] noun 1. a mixture of scrum and waterfall software development 2. the speed of agile software development being chained down with waterfall software development When I became the leader of a development team, the company I was working for used a mixture of waterfall software development and Scrum…

Software bugs are handled by all levels of an engineering department in some shape or form. The goal of dealing with software bugs is not reaching zero bugs as that’s not realistic and causes unneeded stress on the engineering team. …

Being a software developer who designs systems and workflows that focuses on a good customer experience, I had the joy of experiencing a system that was poorly designed and I wanted to dissect this experience to identify the problem areas and why it causes a bad experience. The Experience AT&T schedules a…

Time sure flies! A decade ago, I was fresh out of college and was very lucky to have a software development internship. I stayed at my first job and grew into an engineering director while the tech world changed from desktop to cloud applications. Along the way, I made mistakes…

“Don’t reinvent in the wheel” is a common phrase said throughout life. The same principal applies to software development. Before writing a large amount of code, has someone already solve your issue? Yes? Let’s use the module or library instead of building one. Wait! …

Software teams are moving too fast. Is there a such thing? Yes! Unless there is unlimited resources in respect to man power and money, software development is a balancing act between speed and quality. Focusing too much on speed will lower the quality of the product, but focusing too much…

Comments is such a controversial topic in code. It’s a debate that is almost as bad as spaces versus tabs. There is one major camp that says that code should be written to be clear and easy to understand without comments. The other camp is comments are to help the…

What does “error: W1023" mean? Opaque generic error messages doesn’t help anyone. We’re in the software age where no one reads the documentation so it’s bizarre to expect someone to look up an error code. When was the last time you looked up a phone number in a phone book? Error Messages …