The Software Development Diaries

Controlled Projects Ltd (CP) is changing its online presence.  My little world has to date been a set of oddities and random technical thoughts, this will continue a bit.  But the site will now move towards being more product orientated and the site will become a window further into the world of our development teams [...]

It’s April, Time to unveil a little bit of information on our new “UPG-Framework” platform. This is the new back end platform we have been developing for over a year now and will be moving our existing applications onto, all while developing new ones on the framework.  The UPG -Framework, is a very clever little [...]

So on my way to the usual Wednesday client development meeting, drop in to pick up the coffees, “Medium, de-cafe, latte to go please,” “What size sir?” “eerrr Medium,” “What type you like, regular or de-cafe?” “I just told you, de-cafe please,” “To have in or to take away?” *sigh*, “Takeaway” “that will be £2 please” [...]

Human beings, (non bears), are  undoubtedly one of the most amazing risk assessment machines on the planet   Top of the food chain this hunter gatherer can change tasks throughout the day at a moments notice, filter multiple threat levels, all while planning the next task…. Yet get them to write it down and they [...]

If you think this through enough it sounds completely counter intuitive, i.e. are you asking me to stop planning?  No Lots of managers often hold risk register / collection meetings to walk through risks and create effective mitigation for them.  In software development the correct time to review risk is during the software planning session.  Spec out what you are [...]

This month (submitted on the last day of Feb, that’s cutting it close), is about pricing…. Dun, dun, dun (supposed to sound like the beating of a big drum)!  Why am I blogging about this?  Well the team completed a pitch recently and as a requirement built up how the cost of the work was derived, [...]

I have been working on a support document with our pitch team, basically we are powering up to add a new application to the platform, so naturally we need to support it. I have been absent form blogging while we sit on a whole load of pitches and new business, mainly because I seem to [...]

We have spoken a lot about innovation and change over the life of this blog, it is something we are passionate about but also hold dear to the heart of software development. Over the years the industry has spent its time evolving best practice for innovation through improving methodology and  base coding, for example Agile and re-usable [...]

In our previous posts we did a small bit about failure in software development projects and our thinking, how we aligned to a sandwich shop (to best describe network traffic).  This is the second of our three articles This serious of stories is about trying to position how we got to our current thinking (here [...]

Hi, I am the lead internal designer here in CP, Bernard asked me to do a mini ditto for him while he is tied up (not literary).  The biggest thing we had on our design desk this week, was “What should we call this”, you know when you want to get a message across but the room all read the [...]