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Tag Archives: agile

Burning down your value, not your story

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

What’s the problem with reporting the amount of work we’ve completed the last iteration in story points? Story points are a somewhat arbitrary, but consistent measure of the technical complexity to implement a feature. But that’s not the problem with reporting them to management. The thing is, it’s not what management are interested in. Consider [...]

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I’m not making this mess anymore!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

XP: After 10 years why are we still talking about it? By Robert C. Martin. Uncle Bob argues passionately, and correctly, for the principles of software craftsmanship. Link: http://www.viddler.com/explore/sergiopereira/videos/7/.

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Introduction to XP by Jason Yip

Saturday, March 14, 2009

This is a set of the slides for a presentation introducing Extreme Programming and Agile by Jason Yip. It’s pretty good explanation of agile development principles. An Introduction to XP and Agile View more presentations from Jason Yip.

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Achieving high velocity

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sprint to the lead in your industry – and stay there! So says the back of the dust cover on Chasing The Rabbit: How market leaders outdistance the competition and how great companies can catch up and win by Steven J Spear (McGraw Hill, New York, 2009). I referenced this book last week in my [...]

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Agile primer for business people

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Here is a primer for business people wanting to know what all the terminology in Agile means to them: What You Need To Know About Agile (PDF). It maps the various agile practices like TDD, Iterative Development, Retrospectives, Backlog, Continuous Integration, User Stories and so forth onto common business categories like Increased Quality, Process Visibility, [...]

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Let it fail then learn to succeed

Sunday, March 1, 2009

On the scrum development mailing list, Dave Nicollette recommended shortening sprint length until it failed, then backing up one step: “Oh, my God! You’re going to let a sprint fail, just so you can determine the optimum length?” Yes. In other words, failure lets you learn your limits. But more importantly, as suggested here, is [...]

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UNIX simplicity and agility

Sunday, February 15, 2009

In the course of a series of comments around my post about Oracle’s ADF, I started to think about “vendors” and their technology stacks.  Of all the big vendors whose technology comes closest to playing nice with Agile development and (especially) agile engineering practise and discipline (e.g. test-driven design, pair programming, fearless refactoring, etc), I [...]

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Incremental test running with JUnit Max

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Well looks like Joel Spolsky’s ignorant rant about Test Driven Design (TDD) resulted in some good after all. Kent Beck posted a brief response to Joel, which was pointed out in a mailing list discussion about the issue. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. Anyway it turns out that Kent is [...]

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Code quality and development teams

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Robert C. Martin, aka “Uncle Bob”, lays into Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood: I was riding my exercise bike, listening to Stack Overflow #38 when I heard Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky say “Quality just doesn’t matter that much.” I nearly fell off my bike. (There’s a transcript of part of the podcast on Joel’s [...]

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“Best practice” considered harmful

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Oh yes boys and girls, despite what the “Project Management Manifesto” (and plenty of others) might like to say – ‘Best Practice’ is actually harmful. It is nearly always a codeword for kind of lazy thinking looking to apply a template from someplace else, and is inimical to actual excellence. While experience will give you [...]

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