Nancy Van Schooenderwoert development in a safety critical environment

By Ian Burgess On June 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment · In Agile, Diary

Nancy 20Van 20Schooenderwoert small Nancy Van Schooenderwoert development in a safety critical environment Clarke Ching from Agile Scotland invited the members of Agile Scotland to an event in Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems in Edinburgh, the speaker was Nancy Van Shooenderwoert. Nancy has been active in the Agile world for some time and is in many ways a evangelist.

The presentation was focused on software development in a safety critical environment, which is of interest to all of us as we all know the pain of software that has been developed with bugs in it.

The presentation was based on the core agile practices which help to remove bugs, continual testing, short iterations and continual review of team and design. Team dynamics and collective thinking were seen to be a major contributing factor to the dramatic decrease in bugs in software (there was a focus on the relationship between faults and function points).

The points that made impressions and I have been mulling over since the presentation were around the development of “Negative Stores” looking at faults/bugs that could be predicted and developing code in a way that removes the possibility of occurrences.

The other element was testing for unknown errors by flagging process and information that falls outside of the expected norms rather than just relying on tests that look for a specific issue. This is causing me to revisit much of my current projects testing plans.

Along with a great presentation, the trip back to Linlithgow, the discussion covered several points around the concept of metaphors and a subject that was touched on in the presentation Higher Level Learning. I would encourage you to read Nancy’s work Embedded Agile Project by the Numbers With Newbies

Once again thanks for the invite Clarke.

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