The analysis phase: time to grow up?

When small software companies get bigger they embark on what can be a bumpy ride of change. One of those changes will probably be to do with the way they tackle the analysis phase of the software development life-cycle (SDL). Just to be clear, when I say “analysis phase”, I mean the part before coding starts i.e. requirements elicitation, analysis and system specification.

Typically (although I am sure that there are plenty of shining examples where this is not the case) small software companies with a handful of developers, where the entire SDL for a project is covered by one or two developers, tend not to have a formalised analysis phase. Why is that?

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Clouds Evolve: Dealing with Infrastructure Complexity

As expected, at least by me, Amazon EC2 is evolving in a more “concrete” platform good for web hosting; in fact, some time ago I received a mail from AWS announcing two new features: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones (you read for sure the news also on Slashdot: Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting, isn’t it?)

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Amazon EC2 will get persistent storage

Only a small note to let you know that Amazon is hearing us and added a new feature to EC2: persistent storage.

As a subscriber of AWS services yesterday I received an email in which Amazon announces that we “will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance…”.

The mail ends saying that the new functionality “will be publicly available later this year” and offers a link to request to join the private beta program; I subscribed it and will let you now as soon as I’ll put my hands on it.

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More on the [Computing] Clouds

Recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles1,2 and, remembering my experience with EC2, I discovered that utility computing was not what I was searching for: I was searching for something that helped me without adding complexity, but I was not happy with simple web hosting offers, I wanted also complete control over my infrastructure to have the technical freedom that I could need and because, when I think about my customers’ data, I trust no one.

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Helping Improve Virtualmin

Only a small note to let you know that Virtualmin (from version 3.54) can be used for serious work when importing websites from Plesk backups: I tried the previous version with some web sites but it was too buggy, so I decided to help authors in debugging and testing it; I think that now Virtualmin can import the backups in a rather complete way.

BTW, Plesk is a good product, full of features, but I prefer Webmin/Virtualmin because they let me have full control of the server, instead of the way of Plesk that is too automatic in my opinion and offers less choices, impositions that I feel too strong (one for all: Plesk comes and works only with QMail).

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The Road to MDA

The most expensive phase of software construction is coding and this is because it’s the less intuitive: it requires constant attention and reasoning, errors (logical or not) are difficult to spot because they are immersed in text that often is long, separated in more than one file, and not written by us.

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My Feed is Burning Now

Ok, maybe it’s a period of change for me, so yesterday I’ve added FeedBurner to my blog feed or, to say it better, I’ve added my feed to FeedBurner. I never did it before because I thought that the feed of “my” blog should be served directly and not passing through some unkown entity to depend on exclusively one day (yes, I’m a little paranoid about freedom of speech.)

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