Category

Here are the three most common mistakes (in no particular order) that I see with my clients who are struggling to implement and sustain long-term Agile adoption. Weak Product Owners – without a Product Owner (PO), Scrum does not work.  Thankfully, most of my clients have...

Concerned about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in software?  Interested in breaking the cycle of poverty in your community?  If these challenges concern you, then June Clarke and Nicole Clague have an interesting proposition – offer your time and share your...

….is usually not an approach that works.  However, how do you start the conversation when there is an issue with somebody’s code (or work performance) that needs to be addressed that still preserves the relationship? Earlier this week in the Certified ScrumMasters...

More good links to share with others. Ouija Board Estimation\Seance Sizing – a new method for estimation that relies on team, not the undead. Is the Agile Community Being Unreasonable? – InfoQ takes a look at the friction between the PMBOK and Agile principles....

Links to share with your friends and co-workers Is an Agile PMO possible? – Curt Finch talks about the values of both Agile practices, PMI standards and how to marry the two. Self-organization: the secret sauce for improving your Scrum team – In this 90-miute video...

I want to use this post to talk about the concept of design debt (or technical debt) to describe the variety of “shortcuts” software developers take to compromise design quality in order to gain a short term boost in productivity.  While there may be many good reasons to take...

Last week we talked about Extract Method and why it is so important to know and love.  This week, we are going to discuss another very important principle in object-oriented design and how Extract Class can help us build and maintain better code. If you are familiar with Robert...

Coming off my last rant, I thought it might be valuable to the community if I were to blog on the various refactorings I felt software developers should be using if they consider themselves professionals. To that end, I am going to borrow the refactoring patterns from Martin...

Just the other day I was listening to, i.e. eavesdropping, a conversation between peers where they were trying to decide on what version of Visual Studio.NET their team should migrate to. This team was still using Visual Studio 6 (!!) and wanted to know if they should go to 2005...