Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Bob Lewis has a great column this month, “What if SOA is a mistake“? His penultimate paragraph asks:
Lost in the shuffle is something basic: Programmer productivity. Friends who are hands-on with such matters tell me the available SOA development environments are less than half as productive as products like PowerBuilder and Delphi were, back when [...]
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/.
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 [...]
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 that failure [...]
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 writing [...]
Adam Bien still wants to believe that a JPA layer can directly replace a formal ‘DAO layer’. And I still disagree.
I might agree that for simple enough systems, it could end up being that in fact the service layers end up with PersistenceManager logic directly in their methods. But then I might say a language [...]
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 blog “Joel [...]
Saturday, January 17, 2009
“Programmerless programming” is a fad that never dies. It’s a mirage that never fades but always recedes to just out of reach.
Every few years a vendor, or a group of vendors comes out with some bright idea to allow some class of end-user, or business analyst, or what have you to build their own systems, [...]
Thursday, January 15, 2009
In Emergent Design Scott L. Bain dedicates a chapter to Paying attention to Disciplines: Unit testing. To an experienced agilist this may seem a little basic: of course the discipline of unit testing pays dividends! But I think that we agilists forget sometimes that there are still many programmers – or their management – who don’t value the investment [...]
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Recently I read Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development by Scott L. Bain (on Amazon). It’s a very interesting read.
[E]mergent design works by refactoring and enhancing code, due to the changes, bugs, and extensions that have to accommodate, while paying close attention to these principles of coding. (152)
In order to deal with the idea idea [...]