Saturday, September 26, 2009
Coder Friendly’s got an interesting article about Agile Evangelism. First I’m not going to take issue with the article itself but something that he quotes from DanC’s Lost Garden on Managing Complexity:
The repetative (sic) steps that a single worker performs on an assembly line is a good example of a simple task
This is a terribly [...]
Saturday, September 5, 2009
I kind of disagree with this picture by Josh Susser regarding the “circle of death” in terms of code quality and late night effort. It is right enough as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough.
First up, the easy way out – take a day off, go for a walk in the [...]
Johanna Rothman on agile adoption for the organisation:
Agile requires the discipline to move projects through teams. Multitasking is nuts in agile. Moving team members around to have the “best” specialist available for a particular team is nuts. Performance reviews for individuals is nuts. Managers have to change everything they do, if they want to move [...]
I know that’s a pretty bold statement but here’s why. This morning I went to a vendor’s presentation morning, it was the usual game of buzzword bingo from the very first slide on. All the usual enterprise2.0, social-networking, portal-compliant, content-management, vertically-integrated, SOA-BPM-UCM-JEE-ESB-WS-BPEL platform-framework-enabling scalability-enhancing fun-lovin’ don’t write code but manage-the-enterprise-blog-wiki-twitter-facebook-youtube shopping cart drag-n-drop non-content that [...]
I just want to answer the anonymous “process nazis” trackback on yesterday’s ‘//TODO’ Considered Harmful post, because that blog desn’t allow comments without a login. Quite apart from issues with Godwin’s Law (and that the writer has enumerated a bunch of rules that get “violated” then accuses other people of being process nazis), the post [...]
Yesterday I said that developers should start being a little more militant about the craftsmanship of their code, i.e. pushing back on broken methodology that demands poorly-built code be released into the wild. This sort of code is always inherently fragile and will break your software if it has not already.
Today I just want to [...]
Broken development processes lead to broken code. When you find badly formed code, and especially if you didn’t write it just then in order to make the test pass just a minute ago, and super-especially is the code is already in production, you not only need to rectify the code, you need to rectify the [...]
I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the JAOO conference in Brisbane, and I have a couple of things which I want to say I thought interesting. (‘JAOO’ btw, because I see people asking about it on Twitter, is pronounced a bit like “yow” but with the “j” from German/Dutch like “jah”).
Firstly, I found the [...]
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Also tagged agile, jaoo, profession, scrum, test first, tools, xp
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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 the [...]
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 post [...]