Ever heard the terms star schema, OLAP, fact table, dimension, or business intelligence and wondered what they meant and/or why you should care?  I learned what these terms meant five years ago, and I have found powerful usages for these concepts ever since.

Imagine your business owner is a restaurant manager.  You’ve built a point of sale system that records what customers have ordered.  Begrudgingly, you have also built some canned reports to list out sales transactions within a user-entered date range.  The restaurant manager could browse the transaction history for a particular month to learn Read the rest of this entry »

A as you raise spoon of soup to your mouth B it pulls the string C thereby jerking the ladle D which throws the cracker E past the parrot which jumps F causing the perch to tilt G upsetting seeds H into the pail I adding the extra weight to pull the cord J which opens and lights the automatic cigar lighter K setting off the rocket L which causes the sickle M to cut the string allowing the napkin to swing wiping off your chin

TDD is an excellent safeguard against bugs. Why is test-driven development specifically vital in Agile development?

The hardest part of implementing a new feature is keeping all of the existing features working.

Software can be very complicated, and if you were trying to visualize it, although I don’t like to compare the software we build to a Rube Goldberg machine, you might be able to think of it in those terms, in that if you have a device which works in just such a way and then you add to it there is a good chance that it will no longer continue to work like it did. Read the rest of this entry »