Blogs

If you're looking for a "Business Analyst Body of Knowledge" document, look no further than the official IIBA website. Their current "BABOK" PDF guide is at Version 2.0, and contains 271 pages of useful information for people interested in the Business Analyst profession.

A rough outline of the BABOK document looks like this:

Just a quick note here today that if you're interested in learning about software cost estimating, I've written several tutorials over on my devdaily.com website.

Here are links to several of those tutorials:

If you're a business analyst that happens to know not only how to write accurate software requirements, but also knows about Function Point Analysis, you have an advantage in that you should know when the process of gathering software requirements is really complete.

In short, for a given, basic set of features, you can know that the software requirements process is complete when you can accurately count the Function Points for the application you're designing.

I've written about this before over on my devdaily.com website, but one software requirement best practice is that all requirements should be testable. In fact, I suggest that whenever you write a software requirement, you should always ask yourself this simple question:

Is this requirement testable?

If you think about it, if a requirement isn't testable, how can it actually be a requirement? How can you prove later that this requirement has been met?

Many people here in Boulder, Colorado ask me, "What is a Business Analyst?"

A simple way to answer this is to say, "Tell me about the software or web application do you want to build?" Usually when I first meet them, most clients know vaguely what type of software application they want to build, but when it comes down to the specifics, they have a hard time knowing specifically what they want the software to do.

As I've been getting back into Java programming lately, I've been taking a little time each night to read about design patterns, and make notes about each design pattern, especially as it relates to the Java programming language.

Here then are my abridged notes about the most common design patterns, including Java examples as I was able to think of them.

Creational Patterns

Factory Pattern

As Valley Programming springs to life here in the Boulder, Colorado area, I (Alvin Alexander) thought I would share some of my computer programming experiences.

While you can see many of the websites I've developed by looking at my web design portfolio, my actual degree is in Aerospace Engineering, and I've worked on many, many other software and computer programming projects in my career, including:

Just a quick note here that I, Alvin Alexander, and my company, Valley Programming, have just moved to the Boulder, Colorado area. I actually live in Broomfield, Colorado, which is ten miles from Boulder, and right next to other cities like Louisville and Lafayette.

I just wrote about how to use the Linux find command to find files by modification date, and I thought I'd follow that tutorial up with a quick example of how to find one or more files and then execute a command on those files. You do this with the Unix/Linux find command and the very powerful exec option.

I don't write about Unix and Linux very much on this website, but when I just used a Linux find command to find files that had been modified in the last seven days, a friend said I should write a quick blog post about it.

Finding a file that has been modified in X days

Here's a simple Linux find command that shows how to find a file or directory that has been modified in the last seven days: