PRINCE2 is a formal, structured approach to project management. Agile methods are a family of developer-oriented software engineering approaches. They are very different animals. How can they possibly work together?
Well, wait a minute. There's a clue in there: they are different animals; they're about different things. Different, but exceedingly complementary. PRINCE2 is about project management. It provides a framework for project managers to track the construction and delivery of products against a plan. Agile methods are about constructing software in a more…
...but somebody made me do it!
Sound familiar? Fear not! While effective project management is becoming ever-more important in delivering useful results from increasingly large and complex research software projects, it's not as scary as it might seem.
Project management has its own professional standards and methodologies - think PRINCE2 or PMP - but in its essentials it's really just common sense. While I'm a big fan of the PRINCE2 methodology for development projects, I've also learned over the years that coupling development with the research dimension common…
Well, OK, of course we're not. Most of us are researchers who want to get on and make new discoveries in our chosen fields. Increasingly we find ourselves having to create and use software to make progress, but that doesn't make us all software engineers. What we're doing is research - computational research, if you will - but not software engineering.
Hmm. Hold on a minute.
Research works best without constraints on thought; it needs the freedom to chop, change, freewheel and go off at tangents; it is, by definition, a voyage into the unknown.
In contrast,…
Heavy users of the Hudson continuous integration server software are, no doubt, following the community vs. Oracle tussle in the news and blogosphere. Those of you who aren't, may not care. Before I touch on the current state of names and name-calling, let me put in a word of recommendation for Hudson from a pure software-development perspective.
Hudson is a server software stack that provides an environment for continuous integration. We've used it in projects here at the Software Sustainability Institute. Taverna are big Hudson users, and the ADMIRE project at Edinburgh…
With another hat on I've been reading the recent report from the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data - "Riding the Wave: how Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data". It captures the current state of research's digital landscape very well, offers a compelling vision of the value of scientific digital data twenty years hence, and recommends a number of key policy steps for the EU to consider.
I recommend it. It's a good read - not perhaps in the same way that Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey novels are a good read - but it does underline…