The new Task Parallel Library in the .Net Framework 4.0 is intended to simplify the process of adding concurrency to your application and it does a great job of it.  I’m really impressed by how well it hides the mechanics of threading and lets you...

I’ve been participating in more conversations internally about promoting a team-oriented culture at Microsoft.  Microsoft has a strong individual-oriented culture which works well for many things but doesn’t work so well for agile software development...

In another conversation on an internal email thread, someone asked some newbie questions about Scrum daily standup meetings, like do they have to be every day or could they be done every three days or so?  There were some good replies that encouraged...

When reading other people’s blogs I usually skip over the posts where they announce where they’re speaking next, or where they’re traveling to, or what they’re having for lunch, blah, blah, blah.  But now I’m going to join the dark side and do it...

My current work environment is pretty typical of a lot of tools teams, IT shops, and similar groups; we have lots of relatively small projects to build and maintain.  In fact, we have far more projects than we have people in each discipline (Dev...

Here’s another question that was asked on one of our internal distribution lists: When do we consider a sprint to be a failure?  I don’t know the answer and have no clue about it.  We delivered 7 out of 9 stories we committed with all the release...

As I wrote last time, I made a bit of a mess in my GenesisEngine project by jamming too many responsibilities into one class.  I’m working on straightening that out and ran across some interesting observations already.  I’m not finished yet...

In the process of my continuous learning about agile development, one of my biggest problems is that it’s easy to find materials that say, “Do this, don’t do that,” but offer only trivial examples at best.  I’m always wishing for some non-trivial...

As I wrote in my previous post , BDD is largely about preserving the flow of intent from your user stories to your unit tests (specifications, in BDD parlance) to your product code.  As developers, we’re in the habit of switching over from user intent...

One of the first sessions at the Alt.Net Seattle conference was one on Behavior-Driven Development, or BDD.  Actually, we had three suggested sessions all related to BDD that we combined into one session, which was probably a bit of a mistake in...

There are a couple of posts on the excellent Pandemonium game development blog (which sadly seems to have not been updated recently) that talk about the importance of making your game engine easily configurable and and diagnosable. That’s important for...

Once I had the event aggregator set up in GenesisEngine I could think about how to turn keyboard and mouse input into events that other parts of the app could respond to. The XNA framework doesn’t offer as much help in this area as you might be used to...

GenesisEngine is still a pretty small code base at this point but there are some design elements that I’m pretty happy with.  I’ll run through a series of posts describing these parts so that people can learn from them or maybe critique them and...

IoC containers are awesome and I use them in all my non-trivial projects.  However, there’s an interesting caveat when it comes to using IoC containers that isn’t totally obvious: don’t get domain entities straight from the container. Surprisingly...

I’ve been working on a personal project off and on for awhile now.  It’s called GenesisEngine and it’s a program that generates and renders a procedurally-generated planet.  I can take in the view down at ground level with the terrain generated...

Over the years several people have shared the Visual Studio macros they use to make the BDD boxcar naming style easier to work with.  I thought I’d add my own, not because it’s any better than the others but because it’s built for a slightly different...

Someone asked a question along the lines of, “Let’s say you were hiring senior managers for a group made up of multiple agile teams.  What qualities would you look for in an interview?” The very first thing I’d look for would be a strong understanding...

Formal Code Reviews Formal code reviews are well-known as an effective tool for reducing bugs and improving the quality of your software.  There’s lots of literature out there that demonstrates that the cost of finding and fixing a bug goes up exponentially...

I’ve previously written about the Behavior-Driven Development style of TDD and about how to use such a style in MSTest .  I’ve done this on several personal and business projects and it’s worked pretty well, but I recently got around to trying Aaron...

Someone asked a question on an internal distribution list to the effect of: “My team is thinking about making unit testing a standard practice.  The technical benefits are obvious, but management is asking questions about the impact to the business...

Push Traditionally, software development has been built around a push model of work flow.  That is, as soon as any kind of task is identified, like “add this feature” or “fix that bug”, it’s assigned to an individual.  Each individual has their...

My colleague Robert Hanz wrote an excellent piece for an internal email list and I liked it so much I asked him if I could post a copy of it. Apparently Herb Sutter liked it too! Thanks, Robert! I was reading Blink last night, and one of the things it...

I recently took on the role of ScrumMaster for a newly-formed team that’s new to agile project management.  We’ve had several interesting discussions about various topics that commonly come up when a team is adopting Scrum so I thought I’d share...

A frequent question on the internal email groups around here is, “My team is going to start using Scrum and we need to find a good Scrum tool to use for tracking everything.  What tool should we use?”  Usually these questions come from teams...

Last week I gave a talk titled “Misadventures in Legacy Code” to the South Sound .Net User’s Group , which is the oldest .Net user’s group in the world, having been started during the days of the 1.0 beta. I’ve given presentations to groups at work before...