Welcome to Progressive Development!

Welcome to the adventures of two software developers named Maven and Motley! This blog discusses best and worst practices of software engineering with an entertaining twist.

Motley is  a programmer who has been in the industry for a while who has good technical skills but continuously practices a wide assortment of archaic development methods. Motley is a little egocentric and is perpetually and naively handing out bad advice. Motley is often a bit of a brute and full of suboptimal tips, but because he is a senior engineer, people listen.

Maven is an altruistic software engineer that is extremely knowledgeable in the practice of software development and wants to educate the industry on how to engineer software in the most effective way possible (among other things). Maven is somewhat of an idealist, but his arguments generally hold water and can help guide any software engineer.

  Our story begins this week when Maven is hired into Cynthesis Software - the company where Motley works - to try and turn around their software development practices, among other things. This blog will outline some of their more interesting conversations.

  Conversations are selected according to these guidelines:

• Topics tie back to software engineering (although sometimes loosely)
• Bad advice generally initiates the conversation
• Good advice (best practices) generally concludes the conversation

Summaries of the bad and good advice start each entry, but you'll want to read the conversations to get the details. In addition, Maven  usually provides an extra tidbit and some resources for further information after the conversations. Expect new blog posts at least once per week.

Some acknowledgements are in order: Special thanks to my wife, Stacy, who was a creative inspiration and helper for the blog. Thanks to the Development Excellence Team at Microsoft for reviewing the first couple of blog entries and helping with names. This is the greatest bunch of guys you could wish for on a team. Thanks also to J.D. Meier of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group for inspiring the blog itself and helping with blog tips and reviews.