AI at the Helm - Why Humans Still Matter in Project and Product Management

The Importance of QA

Quality assurance is the planned and systematic set of activities that ensure that software processes and products conform to requirements, standards, and procedures.

AKF

November 20, 2018 · 8 min read

Diagnosing and Fixing Software Development Performance

Diagnosing the cause of poor performance from your engineering team is difficult and can be costly for the organization if done incorrectly. Improve software development team performance by tracking velocity and business value created.

Roger Andelin

November 20, 2018 · 6 min read

The Elusive Data Breach

“but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin...and data breaches. Given the era that Benjamin Franklin lived in the concept…

AKF

November 15, 2018 · 5 min read

Putting Customer Interaction First in Software Development

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing … and your customers/end users are THE Main Thing! Agile development provides the ongoing opportunity to comb the backlog and prioritize projects that have the most customer (shareholder, and hopefully employee) value. So make sure the efforts of your team and your organization are laser focused on what will immediately provide the maximum customer value. This will provide the needed profits to hire more staff and provide room to add in non-functional requirements and R&D projects as part of the larger, ongoing development proces

Pete Ferguson

November 1, 2018 · 7 min read

A Financial Analogy for Technical Debt

When considering technical debt, treat it similar to financial debt. Some debt is good and allows you to get to market quicker. Too much debt results in availability and scalability problems.

Bill Armelin

October 12, 2018 · 8 min read

The Domino or Multiplicative Effect of Failure

AKF Partners Technical Due Diligence and Architectural reviews uncover a company’s system architecture, process, and organization layout. Without ever stepping foot at a client we can begin to see the forensic evidence of potential problems which are included in this article.

Pete Ferguson

September 18, 2018 · 6 min read

Effective Incident Communications

Adopt a communications structure originally pioneered by the military to improve communications and reduce mean time to restore during a major incident.

Bill Armelin

September 17, 2018 · 4 min read

Are you compromised?

A core competency for hackers is hiding their tracks and maintaining dormancy for long periods of time after they’ve infiltrated an environment. They could be utilizing exploits which you have not protected against - so given all of this potential how do you know that you are not currently compromised by the bad guys? Hackers are great hidden operators and have many ‘customers’ to prey on. A sound and diligent security practice is critical.

AKF

September 14, 2018 · 2 min read

Scalability

The Scalability Cube – Your Guide to Evaluating Scalability Perhaps the most common question we get at AKF Partners when performing technical due diligence on a company is, “Will…

AKF

September 10, 2018 · 6 min read

The Importance of a Post Mortem

It is important to identify the difference between an incident and a problem. Solving incidents in an isolated manner will never do justice to solving the underlying problem that is causing your incidents.

AKF

September 6, 2018 · 3 min read

Expanding Agile Throughout

Most times, Agile employment stops at the Delivery Team. This is a disservice to Agile practices and in order to achieve adequate returns it is important that Agile is employed throughout your organization.

AKF

September 6, 2018 · 2 min read