Though I do not plan to go into software development as a career path, I think this is still a beneficial way to learn quality teamwork and collaboration. Regardless of concentration or field of study, computer science and information systems related disciplines require efficient teamwork and collaboration. Working professionally in the field for four years now, there has never been a project or major task that involved no one besides myself. I always had to work with different teams to accomplish the final goal that was needed. Learning this framework could be very beneficial for me moving forward so I can apply it to my future professional projects. Having better tools almost always leads to a better job done, and I always strive to improve and better myself as a technology professional.

One discovery made from this article is that there are other common implementations of Agile outside of Scrum. One of these, I recognized from my professional experience, as my current organization requires all full-time staff to participate in Lean training. I was not aware that Lean training, which according to the article, “aims to eliminate waste and maximize customer value by focusing on efficiency and continuous improvement,” was an extension of the Agile methodology. This is critical, especially in the healthcare environment that I work in. It is an everchanging field and an environment that can change drastically within a matter of seconds. Though I am not a full-time employee and have yet to participate in that training, I will participate in it once I resume full-time work permanently at the end of December 2025.

ZG

The link to the blog post: https://monday.com/blog/rnd/agile-vs-scrum/

From the blog CS@Worcester – zach goddard by Zach Goddard and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

General Formulation

The LoD is essentially a simple style rule for designing object oriented systems.

“Only talk to your immediate friends” is the motto. 

Professor Leiberherr, the author, states a formulation of “Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units: only units “closely” related to the current unit.” Its main motivation is to control information overload thus helping memory management as each item is closely related.

You can informally summarize the Law with these three formulations:

• Each method can only send messages to a limited set of objects, namely to the argument objects and to the immediate subparts of the class to which the method is attached.
• Each method is “dependent” on a limited set of objects (organize dependencies)
• Each method “collaborates” with a limited set of objects (organize collaborations)

To formulate the Law we can choose from the following independent possibilities:

• Object/Class
  • Class formulation is intended to be compile-time
  • Object formulation is intended to be followed conceptually
• Messages/Generic functions/Methods
• Weak/Strong
  • If we interpret it as all instance variables, including the inherited ones, we get the weak form of the Law. If we exclude the inherited instance variables, we get the strong form of the Law.

Benefits

In a paper written by Leiberherr, there are a couple facts stated for the benefits:

• If the weak or strong LoD is followed and if class A’s protocol is renamed, then at most the preferred client methods of A and A’s subclasses require modification.
• If the weak or strong LoD is followed and if the protocol of class A changes, then only preferred client methods of A and its subclasses need to be modified and only methods in the set of potential preferred clients of A and its subclasses need to be added
• There’s even more benefits highlighted in the paper pertaining to limiting information overload.

Final Thoughts:

Prior to this webpage I knew nothing about this law/principle, however I now understand that it is a fairly useful rule or its respective use case. The law teaches you a way to program Classes, Inheritance, Abstraction, and a few other techniques. Infact There is so much more depth to this that I cant even fully fit it into this blog post. I would highly recommend you check out this page as It contains all the information you need along with sources to learn this.

From the blog Petraq Mele blog posts by Petraq Mele and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The importance of team management

In a perfect world a team of developers all work perfectly together synchronously & complete a task in the best way possible. In reality, each team will have people of different skillsets, creativity, and ideas for development. Therefore, teams need to be managed in order to optimize development as much as possible.

Creating a team

Before assembling a team for a project its important to highlight the scope & needs in order to figure out how many, and the type of, developers. According to itrex, some examples of developers you may need would be:

– Software Developer: Engineers and stabilizes the product & solves any technical problems emerging during the development lifecycle
– Software Architect: Designs a high-level software architecture, selects appropriate tools and platforms to implement the product vision, & sets up code quality standards and performs code reviews
– UI/UX Developer: Transforms a product vision into user-friendly designs & creates user journeys for the best user experience and highest conversion rates
– QA(quality assurance) Engineer: Makes sure an application performs according to requirements & spots functional and non-functional defects
-Test Automation Engineer: Designs a test automation ecosystem & writes and maintains test scripts for automated testing
– DevOps Engineer: Facilitates cooperation between development and operations teams & builds continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for faster delivery
– Business Analyst: Understands customers business processes and translates business needs to requirements.
– Project Manager: Makes sure a product or its part is delivered on time and within budget & manages and motivates the software development team
– Project Owner: Holds responsibility for a product vision and evolution & makes sure the final product meets customer requirements

Post-team assembly

Depending on your project you now have an idea on what team you have, the next step is actually managing them. This entails setting clear objectives/goals, creating a timeline, allocating resources, setting communication strategies, delegating, implementing, tracking progress, monitoring project, managing risks/challenges & maintaining flexibility.

Final thoughts

I now have a better understanding the importance of team management in software development. In order to maximize efficiency towards a project/goal you definitely need to manage a significant amount of aspects related to development. The ability for a team to work together is also valuable & must be taken into account. Overall, I really enjoyed researching this topic, the main sources I used in my research was this section in Atlassians website as well as this section in the itrexgroup website.

From the blog Petraq Mele blog posts by Petraq Mele and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.