Agile and Lean Software Development approaches came into favor in the late nineties and beginning of the 21st Century in reaction to the many issues with traditional plan-driven, heavyweight software development processes. However, many of the practices embodied in...
Software Development & Release Management
3 Ways That HxD Can Promote Software Engineering Best Practices
It can often be the case that better software engineering practices may be promoted by the use of good software engineering tools. That is, tools that assist the engineer to better understand the current state of the work product. As we know, the final work product is...
What Happened to IPv6?
There was a lot of talk about IPv6 and how it would affect users and IT infrastructure as a whole when we ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2011. Since then, on the consumer and individual level, we have not seen much change. End users still use their IPv4 addresses at...
Is the Windows Phone 8 Ready for the Enterprise?
Is the Windows Phone 8 Ready for the Enterprise? I suppose the short answer would be, 'compared to what?' I've been an Android user, an iPhone user, and now I'm using a Windows Phone 8 -- and I have my gripes about all of them. Of course the real problem is that I...
Software Development Best Practices: Code Reviews – Part 3
In this third and final installment of my three-part software engineering best practices series on code reviews, we will look at the various tools available to facilitate the code review process. We've already looked at the benefits of code reviews and why conducting...
Software Development Best Practices: Code Reviews – Part 2
In this installment of my three part software engineering best practices series on code reviews (read part one here), we will look at how to make code reviews successful. Code reviews are one of the most effective software engineering best practices you can adopt to...
Software Engineering Best Practices: Code Reviews – Part 1
This article is going to be the first in a three-part software engineering best practices series on code reviews. Here, we will focus on what a code review is and why it’s an integral part of a mature software development lifecycle (SDLC) process. In the following...
OSS, Heartbleed, and the Impact on Medical Device Design
The use of open source software (OSS) within the medical device industry is a double edged sword. On one end of the spectrum, you have freely available code that is available for the world to scrutinize. In the process, one would hope that bugs are more easily...
How-to Run Android 4.4 (KitKat) using VMWare Player
Did you see our guide for running Android 4.0 in VMWare from two years ago? We've updated the instructions, below, to help you get the newest version of Android running to use as a product development tool. Download and setup VMWare Player 6 (note that you will need...
MKSSI Environment Variable – an Integrity PLM Software Primer
I'm not a programmer by trade, so I've had to force feed myself a lot of knowledge – some of it makes sense, some of it is beyond me. I've written this post to serve as an Integrity PLM Software Primer for the MKSSI Environment Variable. I hope you find it useful!...
4 Hardware Recommendations when Using VMs as a Product Development Tool
These days, there is no practical obstacle to using machine virtualization to solve computing problems without the need of acquiring additional hardware. In fact, virtual machines are a compelling product development tool. There are a variety of virtualization tools...
Exploring Java 8’s New Feature: Lambda Expressions
Recently, Oracle announced the release of Java 8. This latest edition has some interesting new features, most notably the inclusion of lambda expressions and the ability to do multiple inheritance through default methods. We’ll spend the bulk of this article exploring...