MIH SWAT

Agile software development methods have reached great popularity among technology-based companies around the globe, arguably due to their effectiveness at managing the project stakeholders’ expectations and goals. However, this positive outcome is directly related to the team members’ ability to carry out the planning phases. And unfortunately the minimalistic theory frequently observed in agile processes tends to result in poorly written user stories. (more…)

One of the most fascinating presentations I attended last OSCON (you can read my review here) was entitled Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript by Jonathan Stark. Jonathan is a consultant for mobile applications, a frequent conference speaker and often quoted when media speaks of trends for internet and mobile. (more…)

The development team at DStv Labs, a division of DStv Online and MIH SWAT has recently been thrown together to look at some exciting projects in the New Media space. In keeping with the latest thinking around agile development frameworks, the DStv Labs team has adopted Scrum as the framework that will be used to deliver these projects. (more…)

Coming from a Flash Developer background I have had no experience with mobile application development. From the time I saw the first phone to run Android, the G1, I have been itching to get into Android development. So when I was recently given the go-ahead to take this journey into the Android world, plus a shiny new Android phone , I was both excited and nervous (more…)

Almost every PHP developer is tracking the changes that will be present in the next release of the language.
For those who have not been tracking the changes, or who have lost track of them – I am here to expose to you everything that PHP 5.3.0 is going to make possible.

The 5.3 release of PHP is the most important release ever, and adds a lot of new features – leading to a delay in its release date. We will look at the most important feature enhancements from version 5.2 to version 5.3.
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Last year brought many changes to our team – and not all of these changes have been of a positive nature. Nevertheless there were positive outcomes, not the least of which has been changing our development platform of choice away from Microsoft technology.

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This post might be considered academic, but it offers a good overview of what I believe to be the guiding principles in terms of software modularity. (more…)

In a previous post we met object orientation’s worst enemy (i.e. strong, unplanned dependencies among classes). It is now time to have a closer look at Dependency Inversion, which is one of the most efficient OOP techniques available with which to fight our adversary. (more…)

Strong dependencies among classes (or components) are definitely the villains within a software architecture. The opposite of strong dependencies, ie completely decoupled architectures, do not exist however, because such a utopian schema would actually result in no messages being exchanged among objects at all. Architects should focus on minimizing strong dependencies, designing only well-planned ones. I refer to the latter as healthy dependencies, and they undoubtedly bring a lot of benefits to a system. (more…)

When we talk about Apple, mankind is pretty much divided into three camps: lovers, haters and developers. Seriously, I never thought the day would come when I’d say such a thing, but the fact is: Apple needs the other Steve. (more…)