A bold statement, I know. But get this, in the many teams and projects I’ve been on, the progression of realization always goes like this: Standup is at 9.00am –> People can’t seem to get here on time for standup. It’s important, let’s all be more responsible –> (People still … Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve had to set up CruiseControl from scratch because most of the time either the project is so deep into quicksand that continuous integration is the least of their problems, or there already is a CI server up and running, or the team has decided … Continue reading
In his book Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck says: Extreme Programming (XP) is about social change. It is about letting of habits and patterns that were adaptive in the past, but now get in the way of us doing our best work. It is about giving up the defenses that … Continue reading
What I think story points are: Allows developers to estimate how much effort a particular task would take, relative to other tasks. Allows project managers/iteration managers/scrum masters/etc to have an idea about how the team is doing, and plan for future iterations. Story points shouldn’t be: A target to be … Continue reading
Michael Feathers and Steve Freeman have a really good video talking about the phases TDD went through over the last few years. I just want to highlight the summary of their presentation. Professionals test their code. And when they say ‘test’, I truly believe they mean writing automated tests. Nothing … Continue reading
Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck Chapter 6: Build Integrity In What I Learned Perceived Integrity is affected by the customer’s whole experience of a system: how it’s advertised, delivered, installed, accessed; how intuitive it is to use; how well it deals with idiosyncrasies; how well it keeps … Continue reading
Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck I picked up this book wanting to know what the hype was about Lean and how its principles can be applied to Agile software development in general. Chapter 1 Eliminate Waste What I Learned: Anything that does not create value for a … Continue reading
I recently wrote a post about whether or not we are practicing Agile the right way and what are the practices we have forgotten about or consciously left out because they made us feel uncomfortable. Jurgen Appelo is running a survey that might give us an idea which practices are … Continue reading
I recently watched this video of Uncle Bob. He asks the hard question, why are we still talking about XP (or Scrum or Agile for that matter) after 10 years? There are many organizations that claim to practice Agile and claim to be experts on it but there is always … Continue reading
One of the many responsibilities of a software architect is to see and understand the big picture of an application. To be able to do that, the architect has to understand the functions of each component in that application, the interactions and dependencies between those components and ideally, have contact … Continue reading