Yesterday I watched a documentary on National Geographic about the infamous Sampoong Dept Store Collapse. It immediately got me thinking of some of the threads running here on testing and the business case for testing. In Agile and in our industry in general we always say that fulfilling business requirements…
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…
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…
Have you ever wondered why earned-value management is not really about value but about cost? According to EVM, as defined for instance in the PMBoK, value=cost aka budgeted cost of work scheduled.
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…
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…
Which are the key agile practices? Researchers José Fortuna Abrantes and Guilherme Horta Travassos combed the research literature and were able to identify 12 key agile practices: test driven development, continuous integration, pair programming, planning game, onsite customer, collective code ownership, small releases, metaphor, refactoring, sustainable pace, simple design and…
Why do you need requirements? To facilitate collaboration! Great podcast from IBM Rational – if you ignore the over commercial cheesy phrases at the end. 10 Things I hate about ALM – Part 3
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…
In a brilliant and hilarious article Zeller, Zimmerman and Bird points out how easy it is to find correlations when mining software archives. In the article, their (mock) argument is that all program errors must enter the source code through the keyboard and thus certain keys introduce more errors. By…
