On Writing Tickets (Part 1)

(Right-Sizing Tickets) Spoiler alert: I’m going to tell you right up front what my conclusion is: Tickets should be large in scope. Also, tickets should be medium in scope. Finally, tickets should be very small in scope. Tickets, tickets, tickets! Tickets for everything! Imagine a ticket with the instructions “create user login.” Cringing? Me too.…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 7)

USE THE ISSUE TRACKING SYSTEM FOR ALL PROJECT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT I propose that it is not enough to simply leave functional requirements in the software requirements specification document. This does not provide sufficient tracing, nor does it provide a clear path from idea to functional code. Here are the steps that I suggest: All…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 5)

RELEASING SOFTWARE When software is released it is typically given some kind of version number (e.g., 1.0). This is good, but it doesn’t tell us the specifics of what went into that build. It’s a good idea to include the Subversion changeset number somewhere in the release so that we always know EXACTLY what went…