Available now on www. lulu.com, ‘Prudent Pathways To Quality’, price £14.99 paperback, £7.50 download.
Order your copy here
Don’t Be Brainwashed. Take the Prudent Pathway.
‘Prudent Pathways To Quality’ challenges the dystopian world which we are being brainwashed into accepting. Those who seek to uphold standards are fighting a losing battle. IT testing is being made into a toothless, ‘rubber stamping’ exercise. In the educational world, the teacher/pupil relationship is being distorted to make the teacher responsible for the pupil’s failings. The quality of the truth is declining in public life. Look, for example, at the infamous ‘dodgy’ dossier which was used to justify the Iraq war. Technology is far in advance of what anyone really needs. How many of the hundreds of cable channels really have worthwhile content? Technology is being developed faster than its users can comfortably absorb it.
The book discusses the nature of quality and shows how the new Quality Driven Development (QDD) methodology can be used to resolve the conflict between the priorities of ‘the project’ and the sometimes inconvenient truth revealed by formal testing. Using practical examples taken from the world of IT development, the book shows how you can take the Prudent Pathway, turn Bad IT into Good, and gain entrance to the glittering City of Quality.
Key Quotes:
IT Quality
Slogans will not, in themselves, deliver improved quality. The words need to be acted upon and the results of those actions need to be measured objectively and independently.
Technology can undoubtedly be created quickly (although there then are doubts as to its quality). However, it is not widely appreciated that there is a limit to how quickly technology can be absorbed by users.
To say that Testing is preventing a system from going live is rather like saying an exam is preventing you from being awarded a certificate.
Buzzwords make a chaotic situation sound like it is following some well thought-out, high-level management strategy.
Freelancing
IT freelancers are good examples of the type of flexible working model we need to assist with economic recovery.
Freelancing is the ‘third-way’ of working, freelancers are not running businesses that require huge amounts of capital investment and loans and they are not employees.
Freelancers are skilled professional workers who independently supply services to a range or succession of clients. Freelancing should be celebrated as a valid career choice, and Governments at all levels must recognise that freelancers are in business and entitled to clear and fair taxation laws.
It is immoral to allow an agency to make money out of a worker on an hour by hour basis, when the agency provides the worker with no direction, and has no knowledge of what the worker does, and leaves them to negotiate their own changes in contractual terms (e.g. renewals)?
If we simply allow direct communication between the hiring client company and the contractor, we can resolve this problem. The database of freelance resource could be provided by industry groups like the PCG or BCS or perhaps the government.
Offshoring
The difficult balance we need to achieve is to accept the global nature of IT and at the same time to not off-shore so much work that we completely lose the skill-base of the country.
IT seems to be going the same way as coalmining and shipbuilding, where we basically gave up on the idea of doing it or even managing it ourselves. However, each interface (offshoring, outsourcing etc.) is an opportunity for confusion, obfuscation and profiteering.
Available now on www. lulu.com, ‘Prudent Pathways To Quality’, price £14.99 paperback, £7.50 download. Order your copy here
Don’t Be Brainwashed. Take the Prudent Pathway.
In 'Prudent Pathways To Quality', Tim Hunter discusses how we can uphold quality standards and produce the kind of high-skilled IT workforce that might help take us out of the recession.
The book discusses the nature of quality and shows how the new Quality Driven Development (QDD) methodology can be used to resolve the conflict between the priorities of ‘the project’ and the sometimes inconvenient truth revealed by formal testing. Using practical examples taken from the world of IT development, the book shows how you can take the Prudent Pathway, turn Bad IT into Good, and gain entrance to the glittering City of Quality.
‘I agree with many of the sentiments in this book..There is much useful material, and the author does highlight various issues affecting quality and offers solutions...’
British Computer Society Book Review, January 2010
Friday, 02 July 2010 09:26 | 
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