Docker is the leading software container platform offering organizations reduced operating costs and increased performance over virtualization technology. Furthermore, Docker lends itself to continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practics, bridging the gap between development and production. Despite its benefits, Docker containers vary in quality of implementation. In his presentation, Michael Ciociola presents rules and guidelines for producing stable and high quality container applications.

PDepend is a simple dependency management script written in Python. This tool is useful to a project team working in a programming language or environment that does not have an easy way to share code across multiple applications. PDepend is also useful to any developer  who would rather stop pretending to like submodule or git subtree.

Our work at Quoin includes multinational and global organizations, and often requires that web, mobile, and enterprise applications can be customized for specific languages. In particular, the Primero platform has this requirement given its widespread use in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. This presentation examines the process and tools for internationalization and localization. Internationalization is the process of extracting strings and other elements that vary by location. Similarly, localization involves the customization of these elements ...

Software project planning and management depends on estimation. Understanding the time and effort for tasks and entire projects is an ongoing concern for development teams. Yet, many professionals struggle with this key aspect of working together and building software. Laurie Corkum gives the second part of her presentation on estimation practices. The presentation focuses on specific techniques for estimation of development tasks, activities, and projects. She discusses how developers actually arrive at an estimate and ...

Dev Ops is a critical function in building software for the mobile web. At Quoin, we focus on assembling the right tools and practices to enable an efficient, robust, and repeatable process from development to production. Moreover, we understand that the development and production infrastructure should be managed like all source code. A key element for this process is automation. Matt Samsonoff presents an introduction to Ansible as a platform for provisioning, build, deployment, and ...

Quoin project teams focus on using a range of quality tools in coding, building, and deploying software. Our work on enterprise systems requires specific ...

Our colleague Bruce Strong (with Mary Lee Kennedy) recently published an article on the effort to transform the New York Public Library for the digital age. How Employees Shaped Strategy at the New York Public Library (Harvard Business Review, December 5 2016) described an initiative that engaged over 250 staff – nearly 10% of its organization – in a collaborative process to improve library services.

Their approach focused on the the creation of three 'communities ...

'Lean' is a methodology that is focused on more effective processes for collaboration and decision-making. Thus, lean is a widely-applicable set of practices; and, can be applied to almost any problem domain. The approach originated in manufacturing and process engineering with minimizing inventory, rework, and other 'waste' in automated processes. Lean was formulated by Toyota, as fundamental to the Toyota Production System. Yet, lean methodologies have been used for diverse activities such as strategic planning ...

Accessibility is a quality of software that enables use by individuals with a range of visual, hearing, movement, and cognitive abilities. Although the needs for specific websites, mobile apps, and other software vary widely, Quoin understands that accessibility is an important aspect of design and implementation. Our project teams have extensive experience in building for accessibility, including the key standard W3C Accessibility Initiative. This set of guidelines includes many best practices, such as display of ...

'Expert estimation' is a predominant strategy for software projects.  However, even 'expert' estimation for projects in a consulting organization provides a number of challenges: we never do the same project twice, the requirements are at a high level without much detail, and we typically don't know which resources will be working on the project.  Even so, our clients like to know cost and duration.