SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale speaks with Peter Thorne, director at Cambashi, a Cambridge, England-based independent industry analyst firm. With his over 30 years of experience as a software engineer user, vendor, and now analyst, Peter's in a great...
When you first purchase PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager, what you are getting is pretty much a blank canvas. To assist you in getting your operation off the ground, PTC also provides a number of different pre-built solutions. These solutions have been designed to...
In a previous blog article I discussed, at a high level, the Integrity to Windchill integration for PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager. Now that we have seen some of the context of how the Integration is supposed to work, I thought it would be a good idea to actually...
If you've spent any significant amount of time in the world of DevOps and Agile software development practices, you've likely encountered the terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). For several years, I've had these terms thrown around me...
The last time SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale spoke with PLM expert Oleg Shilovitsky, they discussed the difficulty of BOMs across engineering disciplines and across the product lifecycle. Here is their next discussion on the latest PLM news and trends...
By now you have probably seen literally dozens of articles I’ve written on PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager, talking about the ins and outs of various pieces of functionality. Today I thought it was time to go into greater detail on documents and how they are...
In my previous article, I define and compare the two software development practices of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. The two practices are complementary and potentially overlapping, but at least their names give us the hint that they are distinct. If...
SPK wants to wish our growing subscriber community a Happy New Year! We’re honored to be welcomed onto your desktops and smartphones to share stories on how to make your engineering team and company work more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, we hope any...
In this third and final installment of my three-part software engineering best practices series on code reviews, we will look at the various tools available to facilitate the code review process. We've already looked at the benefits of code reviews and why conducting...
Agile and Lean Software Development approaches came into favor in the late nineties and beginning of the 21st Century in reaction to the many issues with traditional plan-driven, heavyweight software development processes. However, many of the practices embodied in...
Lately, I've been refactoring some code for a software engineering project completed earlier this year and for which additional work is expected. As a result, I've come to the conclusion that doing occasional refactoring is an absolute must for any programmer. I...
The value system and practices that embody Agile Software Development have been around for well over a decade, and have been touted as having "crossed the chasm" by organizations such as the Agile Alliance, Gartner, and Forrester Research. Numerous studies indicate...