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iso9000 posts

Filed under: Developer

Dev Chair : First love

As the senior manager of the software development team, part of my duty is to interview job candidates. One thing that jumped out to me a while ago as I was going through a resume is that a lot of candidates have more interesting jobs at the beginning of their career than their latest employment.

My own experience is very similar. The first job I got after finishing college was with a software engineering company for transportation (mainly trains) and traffic control system, where 'engineering' meant exactly that. The company was ISO9000/9001 certified so that means every process and decision had to be clearly documented and signed off. The traditional software development model, i.e. "The Waterfall", was king and the thickness of the requirement and design documents were matched by the comprehensive testing documents. Every change request must be approved, coded, tested, and signed off before

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Filed under: Business, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Synthis Process Modeler - Today's Free File

synthis process modelerSimilar to Microsoft's venerable Project app, or (my favorite) FastTrack Schedule, Synthis Process Modeler is a flowcharting/process modeling/doc manager app that is free for the price of an email address. I said similar, becase this is more document and process management, and isn't really designed for timelines. It's pretty robust for a freeware app, but the catch is, for the true ISO9000 or Sarbanes-Oxley features, you'll wind up paying for a server edition, or at least some consulting time with Synthis. It's an interesting way to sell services (not that it's unique), giving away the client software to tantalize the user into the larger products or services. Would you like to super size that?

The Process Modeler itself looks like a pretty good product by itself, however. If you're a one-man show having to manage some project assets, or if you manage a smaller project, I can definitely see this as being useful. Process mapping is drag and drop, linking elements is a right-click away, and publishing to a website (the HTML anyway) is a simple menu button affair. It's hard to make process management exciting though, which I guess explains the monochromatic look of the app and it's icons. Worth a look for small teams though.

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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