Christoph Wienands

Have you ever been on a project where software development worked beautifully but developing and maintaining the database always caused unexpected problems and bugs? Do your changes constantly get overwritten by other developers, or is only one person at a time allowed to make changes? Do you find, after two or three major releases, that it's impossible to create upgrade scripts for existing production databases? After experiencing these frustrations and more, I decided to address them. In this article, I will take a close look at the problems that many software projects face with database development, analyze the cause, and recommend best practices to work around them. The good news is that with the tools available today, you will be able to give a considerable boost to... (more)

Software Factories - Part 1

There is a lot of commotion and hope around Software Factories in the community today, which was originally sparked by the Software Factories book of Jack Greenfield and Keith Short. The promise is that Software Factories will streamline and automate software development to become more efficient and produce higher quality software. However, at the same time there is a lot of confusion ab... (more)

Software Factories - Part II

In Part II of our Software Factories article series we want to highlight how the theory, which we introduced in the first part, translates into practice. One of the things we found out while working with Software Factories is that people quickly get a better understanding just by seeing what a factory can look like. So, now we'll walk you through examples of deliverables for a Software F... (more)