Using JIRA to inform process improvement prior to an ISO 9001 Continual Assessment Visit
This week I showed my new JIRA key performance indicators (KPIs) to the ISO 9001 assessor for the first time. I have been keeping simple statistics for JIRA since installing it in 2006. For example the graph above tells me that we have been opening issues at a pretty constant rate since day one. For a while the number of issues in play (i.e. not closed) also rose. After about a year and a half however, the number of issues in play plateaued at just below 2,500 - our ability to close issues had caught up with our ability to open them. You can see the results of a purge this summer as we prepared for ISO 9001 assessment. The purge focussed on issues associated with obsolete projects, very old issues associated with live projects and issues assigned to staff no longer working with the company. The purge led to two sets of KPIs for JIRA – usage and hygiene.
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Two handy ASCII characters - Up Arrow & Down arrow
The End for Silverlight?
When Silverlight first arrived, I think we were all somewhat unsure exactly how Microsoft planned to topple Flash as the king of rich interactive online applications. Over the past couple of years Silverlight has failed to make the impact I expect Microsoft were dreaming of, and a recent interview with Bob Muglia seems to suggest a shift in position on the future of Silverlight.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t always cynical about Silverlight. I was shipped off to Seattle for training on Silverlight, working with pre-release versions of Silverlight 2. At that time I felt privileged to play around with some genuinely exciting technology, working with nightly builds of the new platform. I was all geared up to oversee exciting new projects, which would all be Flash killers. But two years later these projects never really materialised. We never have clients approaching us to use Silverlight over any other technology, and it’s difficult to argue that a project should use a technology that only 50% of people have installed. I still feel that Silverlight has just not ever arrived.
So, Bob Muglia’s interview (which has of course since been defended and ‘clarified’) suggests to me that Microsoft is trying to reposition itself subtly. I don’t think incorrectly though. I always felt that Silverlight was over-hyped, and mis-sold. After my training I always thought that Silverlight would be great for creating online applications, but wasn’t an exact replacement for Flash. They each have their strengths. Also, with HTML5 on the horizon Silverlight was never going to be the best option for all scenarios on all platforms. Microsoft seem to be admitting that they’ll never get it working on all shapes and sizes of device that access the Internet, and surely that is the case. Silverlight will be one option for developing rich online applications, and is like to remaing a strong choice for data rich applications. I don’t think it’s dead quite yet! Just as Flash will remain for sometime yet a good choice for game development and many applications. It actually cheers me up greatly when Microsoft (or any other large technology firm) talk sense. Fortunately I think Microsoft seems to be doing so more and more these days, after let’s be honest, not a great track record!
Richard Caudle - Senior Developer
Blekko is a participative search engine, which went live yesterday. Users create “slashtags” which limit the scope of the search. Other built-in slashtags are optional search settings similar to Google advanced search flags. Blekko is openly fighting spam, scams and advertisement. How long can a search engine survive without sponsored search results?
Nicolas Desprez - Senior SQL Developer
University of Utah computer scientists developed software that quickly edits “extreme resolution imagery”. The new software - Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability, or ViSUS - allows gigapixel images stored on an external server or drive to be edited from a large computer, a desktop or laptop computer, or even a smart phone.
Nicolas Desprez - Senior SQL Developer
What is the difference between the HTM and HTML file types?
This is something I have always wondered and yet I never thought to look up. To quote Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet:
O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
Thankfully it means very little, well apart from the obvious lack of an “l”, and I can finally stop my occasional wonderings!
Technically speaking they are both sent with a MIME type of “text/html” which tells the user’s browser to expect a page containing html mark-up. It then renders the page accordingly. Seemingly the “.htm” file type is a throwback to the early days of DOS and the Windows 3.x operating systems where the length of the file type was limited to just three letters.
So, which one to use? The choice is yours!
Simon Donaldson - Front End Web Developer
The lossy compression algorithm is based on the WebM VP8 video codec that Google bought in February this year. They claim an average 40% gain on file size compared to standard web picture formats, and looking at the gallery it gives far better results than JPEG.
Nicolas Desprez, Senior SQL Developer
Samy Kamkar came up with a fascinating hack: Storing a cookie using eight different methods (including web history!) so that if all but one are deleted, the cookie is recreated automatically. Evercookie is written in Javascript, Flash and PHP.
Nicolas Desprez, Senior SQL Developer
IE9 will use DirectX for its rendering pipeline. Unfortunately it won’t be released on Windows XP. Microsoft has just made a beta version available here.
IE9 appears to be ahead of the competition as far as accelerated rendering is concerned, although some disagree. Maybe web browsers will eventually look like the way they were portrayed in 90’s movies?
Nicolas Desprez, Senior SQL Developer
Hi burglar, the keys are under the mat
Well, as reported by the Register, it didn’t take long for some enterprising tea leaf in the US to realise that looking at people’s FourSquare and similar updates gave a pretty good indication of whether their house was empty. Obviously they weren’t that smart as they’ve now been caught, however it does serve to remind that throwing out streams of digital footprints does have its downside…..
Ian McDowall, Head of Technology
