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 Development & Release Management
Configuration Management: The Heart of Your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
Does your software development organization have a well defined and implemented configuration management (CM) process? For many organizations, they equate the CM process with having a revision control tool in place. While versioning is a necessary prerequisite 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...
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...
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...
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...
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!...
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...
WinDirStat and Windows File Management
This week we want to cover a utility that allows users to manage the buildup of files that eat up space on your storage device. We are speaking about WinDirStat, which is a tool that presents a graphical view of your entire storage drive (or from a folder level)....
Unix 101: Utilize the “Screen” Command
In my previous post, I highlighted 5 great commands to improve administering your Unix machines within your infrastructure. The very first command I mentioned was screen, which allows you to run multiple pseudo-terminal "windows" within one shell session. Screen also...
Executives, Can you Afford to Stay on a Windows PC?
As the CEO of a technology services company, my personal computing necessities are actually quite simple. I've got to have easy, reliable access to the Internet, the basic Microsoft suite of tools, and I need synchronized email with Gmail, my computer and my mobile...
How To Leverage Jira as a Service Desk
Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with using Jira as an issue tracker. But for those of you who have been juggling issue tracking and meeting SLA requirements -- and for those of you who had the recently acquired VertygoSLA addon -- this article may be useful...