Can’t Drive 55 March 17, 2008
Posted by Randal Stocker in Actionable Intelligence, Supply Chain Visibility.Tags: 55, consumer goods, dependence on foreign oil, domestic motor carrier, economic slowdown, I can't drive 55, just-in-time inventory, national maximum speed, Supply Chain Visibility, Yorktown aircraft carrier
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This weekend I drove from Atlanta, GA to Charleston, SC to see the Yorktown aircraft carrier (a great tour for those who haven’t been). As I was driving back early Sunday morning on interstates 26 and 20 I couldn’t help but notice the semi-tractor trailer trucks that were passing me. I was not going slow, about 5 over the speed limit to 75 mph but many of those trucks were easily doing 90 mph.
The Nixon administration passed the national maximum speed law in 1974 primarily as an energy conservation response to the 1973 oil crisis. It was predicted that 2-6 mpg would be saved for every car and truck on the road. Most consumer products and much of the raw materials for discrete manufacturing in the country are transported using motor carriers (18 wheelers). One of the contributing factors to the slowed growth of the economy from 1974-82 was the loss in shipping productivity. (more…)
SCRUM-O-MATION: Automating along the way equals repeated success and increased agility March 17, 2008
Posted by David Rodriguez in Inovis Solutions.Tags: Automation, regression testing, SCRUM, waterfall methodology
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As we look at rolling out SCRUM across the Inovis universe there are going to be many factors contributing to our success, and one of those things is automation. We’ve talked about automation before, but I want to talk today about how we automate within the confines of the SCRUM model.
As previously mentioned, automation gives us the ability to do more work in a given timeframe or to do the same amount of work in a much-reduced timeframe by utilizing tools that simulate manual user activities. The tools help ensure that testing is done in a consistent manner because the scripts don’t change unless the product changes, and it allows us to do work more quickly because we can run multiple scripts simultaneously, and they run faster than if we were doing the same testing manually. Within the confines of Scrum, the goal is for each of the scrum teams to automate the work they produce within each sprint, thereby eliminating or vastly reducing the amount of time it will take to test those areas again in the future. Once the automation has been completed it does not need to be revisited unless the area of the application being tested changes, in which case the scripts are changed accordingly.
