Ian Alderson

Product Owner
I'm the product owner for Caplin Trader having previously been a software engineer at Caplin for over 10 years, working on Caplin Trader and its predecessor WebSheet.
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Ian Alderson's Posts

Agile
26 Mar 2010
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Agile Software Development – Adoption of Agile at Caplin

Back in January 2005 I had been married for a month and was looking forward to taking a belated honeymoon in March. As you would expect, these were significant life events, however little did I realise that something of a similar magnitude was also looming on the horizon of my…

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Tech Talks
18 Mar 2010
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Tech Talk – Behaviour Driven Development

Last week several of my colleagues and I watched a Google Tech Talk on Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development, presented by Dave Astels way back in March 2006. Although four years can seem like an eternity within software development, I found this video extremely pertinent to what I…

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Real-time web
12 Mar 2010
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Does Spelling Matter for the Real-time Web?

A few weeks ago a colleague sent through a link to this blog by Paddy Donnelly (warning, this link carries a parent advisory sticker) in which he expresses his frustration with web sites littered with spelling mistakes. I also find these mistakes annoying, although I am treading on thin ice…

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Agile
5 Mar 2010
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Imprecise Accuracy is better than Precise Inaccuracy

Last week I blogged about how an estimate is not a guarantee. A small, but important, omission from that post was the distinction between an accurate estimate and a precise estimate. Frequently accuracy and precision seem to be considered the same thing. The critical difference was highlighted when I went…

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Agile
26 Feb 2010
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An Estimate is not a Guarantee

The statement that an estimate is not a guarantee might sound obvious but it often feels anything but. Over the years I have frequently heard managers complain that something has taken longer than was anticipated and have been told to improve the estimates. Of course at times the estimates have…

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QA
19 Feb 2010
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Testing APIs for Backwards Compatibility

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Agile Framework Development and the various techniques that we have used here at Caplin to build our APIs in a way that is sympathetic to agile methodologies. One of the key problems with the iterative development of an API is how to…

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JavaScript
10 Feb 2010
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JavaScript Variable Naming Convention

When I joined Caplin 10 years ago I came from a company that used Hungarian notation to name its C++ and Visual Basic variables. For me, it seemed a natural progression to continue to use these naming conventions and adapt them to be suitable for the JavaScript code that I…

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Agile
2 Feb 2010
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Agile Framework Development

At times it seems that the philosophy of agile software development is at odds with that of framework development. Given the amount of print and web space dedicated to agile methodologies, it’s incredible how little is dedicated to this topic. It’s almost as if this conflict needs to be kept…

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