Browse by Tags
Summary Motley: A tester's job is to find bugs, so measure them on the amount of bugs they find. More test automation is always better. Maven: Do not measure testers by the amount of bugs they report. Think of the test team as more a quality assurance
Read More...
Motley: James, that slacker, is not in the office again. That guy spends so much time outside of work that it's a wonder we pay him. Maven: Well, everyone is entitled to a bit of vacation now and then, don't you think? Motley: If that's what you want
Read More...
Summary Motley: Use Scrum in my personal relationships? Don't be such a geek. Maven: You can apply the same lessons as Scrum teaches to your personal relationships - lots of communication, planning, iteration, and retrospectives focusing on continuous
Read More...
Summary Motley: Features sell a product. When in doubt, add more features! Maven: These days, software is less about features and more about reliability, fit 'n finish, performance, and usability. Use the Kano model to help you focus on the right scenarios
Read More...
Summary Motley: Milestones are useless for agile development. Our feature team can ship at the end of every iteration, so milestones have no value for us. Maven: Milestones provide a synchronization point across a set of features, helping to ensure the
Read More...
Summary Motley: Don't be anal about Application Programming Interface (API) design. Maven: Good APIs are discoverable, consistent, simple, usable, hard to misuse, cohesive, lack side-effects, strongly typed, documented, has tests and samples, extensible
Read More...
Hello faithful readers! A small announcement: I have decided that with the summer months approaching here in the Pacific Northwest I am going to decrease the frequency of blog posts for a while to once every two weeks (biweekly). The reasons are several:
Read More...
Summary Motley: Bug fix sprints are a Scrum anti-pattern. Quality should be kept high so as not to have to focus on bug fixing. Maven: A clear meaning of done for sprint tasks is important, but even if you follow this best practice, there will always
Read More...
Summary Motley: OneNote is just like Microsoft Word, and is not a place where a developer should be spending time. Maven: OneNote is perfectly suited to feature teams and developers. It provides simple, organized, efficient, and easy to manage method
Read More...
Summary Motley: Too many assertions make debugging very annoying! Maven: Lots of assertions are great, as long as they validate the right assumptions. If an assertion fires it is likely manifested by a bug, so get to the root cause and fix it. Best practices
Read More...
Unfortunately, life got in the way this week and I didn't have time to put together a decent blog entry. Sincere apologies. I'll do my best to have Maven and Motley back next week with their zany adventures in software engineering. If you have suggestions
Read More...
Summary Motley: Management wants clear predictability of all the features we will be delivering in a release. I don't have a crystal ball, and agile removes the need for one. Maven: Balance long term planning with short term iterations. Agile can play
Read More...
Summary Motley: I cannot get management to accept our "new" way of executing. They are stuck in their ways of thinking. Maven: Change is hard. Do your best to come up with a plan that explains the "why" of the change, enumerates the benefits, mitigates
Read More...
Summary Motley: There's not much to public speaking. Maven: Public speaking requires a lot of practice and know-how. Have a good objective, know your target audience, set expectations, use minimal slides as a visual aid, practice, use a summary, and work
Read More...
Summary Motley: Native C++ code development is obsolete. Everyone should be using a language like C# or Java. Maven: Managed code is a great platform, but there are still reasons to use native C++, such as enhancing legacy code and developing an operating
Read More...
