Minimal Effort Software Engineering

Applications used to be monolithic, end-to-end do it all systems. Developing these mamooths often failed and still continues to fail today. Enter the idea of software ecosystems. For instance, Jan Bosch wrote about the concept in this article from 2009. Software systems are increasingly not developed any more. They are…

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The Role of Personality in Pair Programming

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Does personality matter in pair programming? According to this Norwegian study – http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TSE.2009.41 – it does not. [bibcite key=”citeulike:9782651″] So what does matter? Experience and expertise.

References

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Changes as Objects

http://www.mendeley.com/research/extreme-programming-agile-processes-software-engineering/ In this article the authorsn suggests that many of the problems associated with changes in agile software development can be managed by treating the changes as ‘first-class objects’. Sounds complicated to me. What do you think?

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How to Fail as an IT Purchaser

Caveat Emptor

Update 2014-11-15: This problem is still unsolved. Now contracts are being won with even -11 SEK/h bids for some categories of consultants. Yesterday Computer Sweden revealed how a consultant company had managed to win a bidding competition for providing IT consultants the Swedish social security agency (Försäkringskassan). Their idea was…

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Issues with Agile Software Development?

While there has been a bit of research detailling the advantages of agile software development not that much systematic work has been done to find the issues arising from using the agile paradigm. So, what are the issues with agile software development? In “A Comparison of Issues and Advantages in…

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Sometimes all you need is a little help…

When you review documents, test applications etc it is very easy to get stuck on shallow problems and give comments which are not really helpful for the developers. Using checklists can be one way to force yourself to look beyond the most obvious things. I recently found two good checklists/protocols.

Did Agile Ruin your Life?

Did agile ruin your life? These pair programmers do no seem that concerned.

Daniel Markham has written a rant about how many people feel that Agile has “ruined their lives”. Basically, he is saying that to these people Agile is just a new name for snake oil. Agile coaches are nothing but scamsters. The books they write are nothing but positively biased stories…

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How fast is research advancing?

In the IT industry, everything is moving at a fast pace. New products and services are released daily. So it would follow that computer science research is moving at a similair breakneck speed? Not so according to a recent bibliometric survey published in the communications of the ACM. The “half-life”…

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Is there any real difference between Burn Down Charts and EVM?

A burn down chart

[bibshow]In the September/October 2010 issue of IEEE Software Hakan Erdogmus discusses the differences between Earned Value Management and current agile practices such as burn down charts. His conclusion is that while similar these two concepts are not the same.[bibcite key=”citeulike:13767577″] I do not agree, I think burn down charts and…

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Do I have a healthy test suite?

With TDD etc we are all assuming that we have a healthy test suite. Now some researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium have published a way to actaully measure this. Their idea is to plot on one axis the percentage of the total code base that is test rather than…

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