How good is the link between research and practice? Not good enough I guess. Follow this interesting discusison on LinkedIN.
Let the estimation goat do all the hard work of guessing for you.
Agile contracts, what are they? There is a kind of bad old tradition that software development contracts should be one of the following types:
There is no doubt in my mind that fixed price contracts are a bad idea. Read the rest of this entry »
Should you focus on the agile process or tools or people? IBM says you should focus on people because they are what makes a difference in a project. That might sound logical, but is it? Read the rest of this entry »
What’s Agile for Drivers? I have always been driving kind of ad hoc. Getting from A to B with no particular plan. If I were a programmer you would call it “cowboy coding” but I’m not, so we can call it “cowboy driving”. People, everyone it seemed – my boss, my wife, my children, the odd passengers, were all complaining that I needed to use sound engineering principles and state of the art equipment to improve my driving skills. “It will help you get from level 1 to level 2 or even 3″, they said. Read the rest of this entry »
Is it appropriate to call a driver’s license a unit test? Would that be consistent with unit testing best practices? That was part of the discussion that erupted on our internal Yammer network after someone posted a link to coding by numbers. I argued that a driver’s license was not properly a unit test but an acceptance test of an incoming delivery. When you read the following, bear in mind that software development is a design activity. The context here is a company that needs help to design a solution for transporting people “from A to B”. This was the argument I made against saying that it is best practice to call a driver’s license a unit test in accordance with unit testing best practice.
The driver is a unit in the final system just as the car is. Read the rest of this entry »
I love configuration management! “But”, you ask, “isn’t configuration management boring?” Well, configuration management can be boring and tedious if you do it manually. With modern tools it is not all that bad. Even if it is boring, that is out-weighed by the sheer importance of proper agile configuration management for a successful software development team.
Read the rest of this entry »
Which agile estimation units should you use? You can use any arbitrary units to estimate backlog items in an agile project. It does not matter if you do your estimation with story points, ping pong balls, man days, man hours, kLoCs. After a while your teams will converge on a common understanding of what the units mean. Read the rest of this entry »
Does brainstorming work? The post has lead to a few follow ups. As always, there is a question of is it done right? To take a quote from the article linked:
“Group brainstorming sessions might produce a higher volume of ideas than a single person would but groups don’t produce higher quality ideas. A small number of people often dominate the conversation and group think almost always happens as a result of peer pressure. In my experience, the most creative ideas have come from individuals working alone.”
Obviously, this is an example of brainstorming done wrong. Perhaps this happens all the time when mr Becher participates in a brain storm meeting. I do not know as I have never met him. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are a few things to remember about Agile:
A Waterfall is Fine – for Watching
Wordle for March 2012
Agile Offshoring in Practice
Waterfall got it right… almost