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19
JUL
2016

How to Improve Your Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a fundamental programming skill in short supply today.  TDD is a powerful design technique that improves the quality and reliability of software as unit tests are automated and run more frequently.  One of the key concepts behind TDD is that the...
16
MAR
2015

Peopleware: Productive Teams and Projects

“The major problems of systems work [software development] are not so much technological as sociological” First published in 1987, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister were some of the earliest people to think of software development primarily of a human challenge rather than a...
15
JUL
2014

Your Code Sucks!!

….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...
26
JUN
2014

Why Use Cases Are Still Important…Even if you Have User Stories

A while back, I made the claim in one of the Agile LinkedIn groups that writing use cases was one aspect of being a professional software developer.  That naturally received a bunch of push back from people who felt use cases were too heavyweight.  Many people claimed user...
20
JUN
2014

Blow the Place Up!

The ultimate goal of any Scrum implementation is to implement a profound and far-reaching transformation of a mediocre business into an industry leader for their market.  If you merely want incremental improvements on the margins, then I suggest you try Kanban since it demands...
09
JUN
2014

Who Is Responsible for Quality in Scrum?

To build a quality product we need to let go of the outdated 20th century idea that quality can be achieved through inspection alone, i.e. testing.  Instead, let us focus on constructing a framework that produces quality outcomes from the beginning and the two Lean concepts...
18
NOV
2013

No Points for Bugs

To start this post, I want to share a bit of dialogue between two characters in the 1987 movie The Princess Bride after their repeated attempts to foil the main character (in this case, after cutting a rope he was climbing).  This esoteric reference  demonstrates how completely...
27
APR
2010

Best Links of the Week – Mar 27th 2010

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....
05
JAN
2010

Best Links of the Week – New Year Edition

New Year links, a little late, but ready for your review. Defense Procurement Goes Agile – a summary from the Agile Process Leadership Network’s (APLN) October 2009  meeting describing how the DoD is moving away from waterfall to an iterative, incremental processes....
14
SEP
2009

Seems Obvious Now

Just wanted to reiterate the value of TDD – I am working on a programming challenge and was surprised how easy it was to add a hunting and killing algorithm to my program.  Since it was written using TDD, I had a nice suite of fast tests which allowed me to incrementally...