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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
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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
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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
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I wrote about my preference for short Scrum sprints last month, where “short” means no more than two weeks. Recently there was another internal email thread on roughly the same subject where some people listed some concerns they had about moving
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There have been several blog posts written recently on the topic of TDD and whether it ultimately makes you more productive or just slows you down. I don’t have much to add to that discussion but I found a comment left by Ben Rady for one of Bob Martin’s
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Here’s one more thought on the subject of complexity in software development: software development is NP-hard . Software development (in the sense of building large projects end-to-end) has these characteristics: A proposed solution can be easily proved
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My previous post talked about how software development can’t be modeled by any process that’s significantly less complex than the development process itself. I’d like to expand on that a bit more. Irreducible Complexity I think people are attracted
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A recent internal email thread asked about the difference in philosophy between Agile development and Waterfall-style development (or anything that promotes BDUF). There’s the Agile Manifesto which clearly articulates the basic assumptions of that movement,
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Sometimes the Scrum process kind of breaks down. Maybe there’s confusion over backlog items, or some people end up with nothing to do, or there’s a general sense of spinning the wheels but not getting anywhere. I’ve seen these kinds of symptoms
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This is a little late but there was an interesting internal thread about Tom DeMarco’s recent article in IEEE Software entitled “ Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? ” In it he recants his early writing on the topic of metrics
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Over the past few months there have been several interesting email threads on internal aliases at work that have helped clarify my thinking about various Agile topics. I thought I’d share some of the things I wrote in hopes that it’ll be useful
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I’ve had several discussions recently with coworkers about Agile project management processes, and one point I’ve found myself making repeatedly is that agility in your process tends to demand agility in your code base. If you can’t rapidly evolve
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In my previous job, I once scribbled something on a window that caused a bit of head-scratching by people who read it: “Source code is a liability, not an asset!” Of course, the idea isn’t original with me. I got it from (I think) Tim Ottinger and Alan
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I’m about 2/3rds of the way through Object Thinking by David West. I picked it up on Mo Khan’s recommendation and it’s definitely worth a read. It’s not a new book (published in 2004) but the principles it explains are pretty timeless.
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