Sam Bryan

For my final blog for “Software Design and Architecture” this semester, I decided to research time management for doing software projects. This is an issue that I ran into creating my final project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to learn from my experience while it was fresh in my mind. I thought this would be particularly helpful because I would like to do a few projects for fun over the winter break. I don’t think that I’m alone in that without a looming deadline, what little time management skills I have tend to go out the window. I hope this will change this time. I doubt reading an article will transform me into an extremely productive person, but at least it might point me in the right direction. I can only hope. The article that I found was from *codeproject.com* and was titled “Time Management Tips for Developers.” I thought it gave some good pieces of advice. Even if you are not a software developer, you could benefit from all the advice given. I will focus on three...

For my last blog for this class — Software Quality Assurance and Testing — I decided to look at what I could find about the subject in the news. After searching around, I found an article from Forbes  that came out only a few days ago — December 17. The article was titled “AI In Software Testing: Will A Bot Steal Your Spot?” My first impression before I read the article was, “Of course not! There will always be people whose job it is to test software.” Software is growing to touch every corner of our lives, and even if AI is incorporated, I would think it would be unlikely that they would entirely, or even partially, replace testers. Halfway through the article, the author confirmed my skepticism by saying, “While it’s unlikely the testers will be wiped out, I think machine learning and other branches of AI will significantly alter the way software testing is conducted.” The article seems to have a misleading title. The article goes on to give several examples of how robots w...

For this week’s post for software architecture, I decided to explore pursuing it as a career. I have focused several of my posts in this blog to going into a career for software architecture and quality assurance, but software development is very appealing to me as well. Although I have found this class more difficult than the quality assurance class, I find the work we have done in this class very satisfying, and I would like to do something like this in my career. I found an article from “Lifehacker,” where they interviewed a software architect Harrison Ambs on what it was like to be a software architect. It focused less on what a software architect is, and more gave general career advice for someone in the industry. The final question in the interview said, “What advice would you give to those aspiring to join your profession?” He gave a paragraph with some good advice. (Starting with, “Always be willing to learn something even if you know you’ll be terrible at.”) However, I w...

For this week's software quality assurance Blog, I would like to revisit software testing as a career, because it is something that I am interested in pursuing. I found an article, “Software testing is big business,” from a South African website, “itweb.co.za”. In the article, it stresses the importance of quality assurance in software. I think I have said here in this blog how fickle customers can be with software that is buggy and jump ship at the first chance if the code causes them even a slight inconvenience. If I have not said it here, I know I have read something similar before. The article repeats this sentiment, and it is probably something worth repeating.  The article continues and says that developers often rush to add new features, while leaving quality assurance as an afterthought. The article claims that when companies allocate resources properly, about one third of IT budgets are allocated to software quality assurance and testing. The article says tha...