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 [...]
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 [...]
Filed in architecture, business, professional practice, programming, rants, tools and techniques
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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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Paranoid Engineer has declared ‘Screw All Gui Builders‘, with an excellent example of the genre of code that can be produced by one such tool, contrasted against the much nicer hand-written code. Now I can certainly sympathise with his pain. The thing that really gets my goat up, and the subject of this post, [...]
Filed in infrastructure and frameworks, rants, technical, tools and techniques
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Also tagged ajax, code, framework, IDE, java, oracle, tools, weblogic, wizards considered harmful
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