Power BI – The Six Reports Every Consultancy Should Have

I’ve been at SSW,  a medium sized custom software consultancy, for over 10 years, and in that time I’ve asked for a number of SQL Reporting Services reports to be made, but due to the difficulty in getting exactly what I needed out of the developers, I still had to make many decisions based on…

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Seven Tips to Being a Great Product Owner

Every software product in development has a Product Owner who is in charge of supplying the requirements, and it is often misunderstood how important this role is. You can have the best engine in your car (the development team), but if you steer in the wrong direction, you’re not going to get to your destination.…

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SSW Data Onion – Helping you Simplify your Data Layer

At SSW we build software for a large range of clients, from start ups to massive enterprises and even our own internal projects. We care that the software we build is secure, maintainable and testable. Successful devs use great tools, great frameworks, and follow best practices. Choosing great tools like ReSharper and Octopus Deploy is…

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What’s new in Visual Studio 2015 and ALM 2015

I’m off to Europe for the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo and the Xamarin Hack Day in Slovenia. Of course I’ll be talking about Visual Studio 2015 and all things mobile. At SSW we’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 on a few projects and it’s a bigger change than I expected. Thanks to a new/refreshing/cool/awesome…

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The Agile Olympics – it’ll be Scrumtacular

It’s no secret that I love Scrum. I’m a Scrum.org certified trainer and delight in teaching courses across the country. We follow Scrum at SSW – not just the developers, but the graphic design, marketing, and multi-media teams as well. I even use it at home with my family and for my kids’ soccer team.…

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Getting 96% Code Reuse with Xamarin Forms

UPDATE: See my interview with Miguel de Icaza on SSW TV We’re putting more and more business logic in our pockets these days and with our latest project we’ve crammed in an entire nursing home! To keep our mobile application lightning fast and make the most from a phone’s tiny resources we’ve decided to go…

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The Five Things Every Scrum Master Should Do

The larger a Scrum team is, the more opportunity for wastage there is, and so the more difference a good Scrum Master makes. A team with a bad Scrum master can feel powerless, floundering, isolated, and overwhelmed whereas a team with a good Scrum Master generally feels well informed, connected, directed, powerful, and like they…

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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

There are five interrelated issues that undermine the performance of a team, and they can be viewed from 2 angles: The Negative Angle This is popular because as managers we’re often looking for what’s wrong so we can fix it: Absence of trust.  If the members of the team do not trust each other, then…

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43 Angular 2.0 Resources to Supercharge Your Learning

Since it was first released by the Google team in 2009, AngularJS has shot to fame as one of the best JavaScript frameworks available today. Where we used to struggle to maintain and test sprawling spaghetti code, Angular neatly bundles your work into a tidy, testable framework that makes both developing and maintaining Single Page…

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