Search by author: Gareth Saunders

Gareth is the web architect within the University of St Andrews digital communications team. A graduate of St Andrews (BD Hons, 1993), Gareth joined the web team in 2006 and worked mainly on information architecture and front-end development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). He currently spends most of his time doing DSDM agile project management and business analysis.

Gareth Saunders

No more IE bug hacks

No more IE bug hacks Last week I was speaking to a joint class of management and computer science students about our experiences of working with web standards through the years. Someone asked me what difference…

DSDM Agile project management cheat sheet

Just over a year ago I was sitting in a classroom learning about and sitting two exams on DSDM Atern Agile project management. Something that I wished had been available at the time was some kind of cheat sheet that…

Sprint notes for DC1001 (sprints 13 to 15)

Something we want to get better at is improve how we communicate our progress on current projects. This will be the first of many such posts. We’re currently working on one very large project, DC1001 External…

Velocity and why it’s important

Velocity is an important tool in Agile. Let me explain a little about what it is and why we find it useful. Speed = distance over time One of the challenges when planning each two weeks’ sprint is working out how much…

Reduce the file size of PDF documents

A few months ago, while quality checking our new prototype website I discovered a page that was linking to three PDF files. The problem was: they were enormous. The largest document was over 63 MB; that’s about…

Versioning—a brilliant, daily newsletter about the web

Versioning—a brilliant, daily newsletter about the web One resource that I’ve been enjoying over the last few months is Versioning from Sitepoint. which describes itself as a “a social news site for kind web folk”. At…

Planning poker—why and how we estimate

When creating a plan—whether it be a big project release plan or a smaller two-weeks’ timebox plan—you essentially need to know three things: Tasks —What are the requirements? What do you need to do? Size — How big are…