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Author Archives: J.Dobson
A Reading List for People Who Want to Know More About TDD and Legacy Code
There are two things we have to consider when considering recommending books on working with legacy code. The first is what type of problems lend themselves to a solution using a best practice. Unfortunately, not many. The second is isomorphism. … Continue reading
The Exponential Point of No Return
Last year, Jorrit and I visited a client in the south of Holland. It was a misty day, the sort of November morning that grabs hold of you. The office was a square building, the car park too full, to … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged five stages of decline, org, organisational debt, Systems thinking
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It’s Not All Software – Helping A Cell Phone Manufacturer
One thing we do is build organisational structures that enable success. We have a number of configurations for financial engineering, but they look suspiciously like the configurations that can be used in hardware companies… What a hardware and financial engineer … Continue reading
Belgium Test Days, 2011
Jorrit and I are not historians, nor scientists, but like psychologists, we scrimp and scrape, borrow and steal from whatever sources we have at our disposal. This re-combination is how we contribute to the community. The most obvious thing we did was combine modern development with financial engineering. However, we do more subtle things… for example, once we managed to combine a model for debt with the company life-cycle. This year, for fun, we started work analysing resistance, what in organisational theory is known as ‘dynamic conservatism’. We took apart our clients, looked at them, we raked over our notes. Then we stopped and went back in time. Continue reading
T-Bar; A Coherent Model for Financial Engineering
uGly Duckling’s philosophy combines a bottom up with a top down approach for creating and running cross functional teams. Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged cross functional teams, financial engineering, Systems thinking
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Reducing Operation Risk: The First Baby Step
In our experience, each client is different, context is always king. However, because many financial institutions start off with end-user programmers, people who program for themselves, usually in Excel with VBA, the organisations tend to follow similar growth paths. In the end, financial institutions end up with a consolidated engineering team, what is often called the ‘Engineering Hypermarket’. Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged automated testing, operational risk, smoke test, Square Law of Spreadsheets
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XPDays – Agile Group Dynamics
Extreme Programming (XP) is a collection of tools for building high quality software. The practices are so well known, now, that they are often taken for granted. A conference in England, XP Day, has this slogan: more than XP, more … Continue reading
Posted in Conferences
Tagged cmmi, extreme programming, people vs. process. agile, quality, xp, xpday
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In Defence of Moving Forward
An essay about the maturation of financial engineering teams. Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged Agile, engineering, Hull, peopleware, Solving Tough Problems, Systems thinking
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It Won’t Work, It Won’t Work, It Won’t Work. It Worked
“It Won’t Work, It Won’t Work, It Won’t Work. It Worked” was offered as a talk at the 2010 Testing & Finance conference. A conference for testing and finance professionals in Bad Homburg. Continue reading
Posted in Conferences
Tagged automated testing, Bad Homburg, testing, Testing & Finance
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