Bud's Student blog

We 're closing off blogging at 12:00 in 45 minutes.

Good luck with the term.

n IS449 and IS696, one member in each student group should write a blog post with links to the group site. You should also include a link to your slides. The post should be tagged as follows:

• NameOfGroup
• Iteration 2

Then all students in IS696 and IS449 should review all of their projects in their own class as well as the other class. The reviews should be tagged:

• Name of the group you are reviewing.
• Iteration 2 Review

In IS449 and IS696, one member in each student group should write a blog post with links to the group site. You should also include a link to your slides. The post should be tagged as follows:

• NameOfGroup
• Iteration 1

Then all students in IS696 and IS449 should review all of their projects in their own class as well as the other class. The reviews should be tagged:

• Name of the group you are reviewing.
• Iteration 1 Review

emuonline seems to be broken, so I'm posting the slides here.

IS247-3-Links.pdf

Mike in IS449 raises an interesting point:

Agile Web is a great concept, but my dad's business doesn't implement that process of producing systems if I understand him right. He is still mainly directed by the systems design life cycle, most of the time less than even that because of the demand of customers. So are the theories of agile the direction the market is moving or will it be an even more refined era of systems integration that it heads to? It is hard to tell but it will definately be notably important to be familiar with both.Mike Souders

To which Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror seems to respond:

Often, you can't even begin to accurately estimate how long something will take until you start doing it. At least some of it. That's why so many teams turn to agile, iterative development techniques; part of each iteration involves exploring all those unknowns and turning them into slightly-less-unknowns for the next iteration. The faster we iterate, the closer we get to an accurate estimate, and the more work we get done along the way. We plan by doing.Coding Horror

You should also have a look at this interview with Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations: Innovating in a Mature Market.

The real point though is not that agile is great, rather it's that project management is about mitigating risk. SDLC takes one approach to risk mitigation that relies on extensive pre-implementation planning. Agile takes another that relies on attempting to implement components very early on and then re-estimating effort for the whole project based on actual data. People have turned to agile methods because they feel there is often not enough accurate data to undertake the detailed planning required to make SDLC succeed.

However, at the end of the day, as Mike notes, you're really obligated to communicate with the people who are paying the bills and use the method they require.

Some people are wondering, but you must have five posts completed by the first week after we started blogging in class.

A number of students have noted issues with writing code and one noted a solution. As it turns out, there is a very easy way to post html code in a post, it's the xmp element written as follows:

<xmp>some code</xmp>

For instance, the following line uses the xmp to show the code for linking to my site:

The problem with xmp is that you can't really use it to display an element in line and you can't use it to enclose itself. For that, you'll have to use Tobias Steck's solution.

Will this work.

I am writing this to make sure that students can still post to their blogs.