Agile Change Requests

Gold dollar symbols falling through an hourglass 3d Rendering.

There are change requests and then there are agile change requests. Now, I hear some of you saying to yourselves: “He is crazy, there is no such thing as ‘agile change request’!” You are right, partly, I agree that agile methods were designed to avoid change requests. But! All change…

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Can Source Code Metrics predict Maintainability?

I did my Ph.D. thesis on how network factors can predict and influence user satisfaction in wireless networks. I.e. how “hard” but low-level technical factors have an impact on more abstract entities. Hegedűs et al does something similar but for source code metrics and their impact on maintainability. It has…

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About the Agile Mindset

What makes Agile Software Development methods different from Traditional Software Development methods? There are the obvious answers related to different techniques used, e.g. early integration rather than late integration or dividing the problem space from the client perspective (user stories) rather than the technology perspective (client-middleware-database). But essentially the major…

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Fake or Real Agile?

Seems the last few days have been full of discussions about what is fake and what is real. A Facebook friend posted an image of a hunter, an elk and a cougar. Turns out it is fake. I read in the newspaper about how larger clothes manufacturers send “samples” of…

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Legacy Code

Legacy Code… We all love to hate it. We all have it. Some of us keeps creating it. How do you deal with it once you have it? Sometimes we find problems with it. But then, what do we do? A colleague at Capgemini, Paul Oldfield, suggested I should read…

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Attending Speech about Agile RUP

I am attending a great speech by Julian Holmes on Agile RUP.

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Agile Practices Reduces Software Development Issues

In a large study of the effects of switching to agile ways of working at a unit of Ericsson in Sweden researchers Kai Petersen and Claes Wohlin found a number of issues with Agile Software Development but far fewer than with the previous plan driven approach. The table below shows…

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Agile Developers Trust their Teams

Four people using each others as support form a small spiral.

Yesterday, I wrote about the methodological challenges of correlation based research on software artefacts. The article which is the base for this post also has a fundamental methodological flaw. McHugh, Conboy and Lang have perfomed a post hoc study of trust in agile software development teams where they asked the…

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Benefits of Kanban

In a recent, well written but smallish study, a team of researchers from Finland have tried to find where KanBan has benefits. In their setup, teams of master students were instructed to use KanBan in their software development projects and then interviewed about their subjective perception of the benefits of…

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The Configuration Manager … in Linköping.


Picture of one of the entrances to C-huset at Linköping university, Campus Valla

The c-house at Linköping University. ‘LIU im herbst by deruneinholbare, on Flickr.’
Licensed under a Creative Commons License, click on image for details.

I spent last Friday in Linköping. It has been almost 12 years since I was there the last time. This time I came for two reasons: Continue reading