Agile coding, agile testing, agile coaching, the agile enterprise, and Network Weaving.
Long Live Storytests, Dang Blast It The recent claims made by a well-known agile coaching thoughtleader notwithstanding, I work hard to get clients to adopt real Storytesting practices, with real Storytesting tools (FitNesse is still my tool of choice; I work mostly with Java teams). I will continue to do so. I find no false economy [...]
Hypothesis: Good OOD Programming is “Lingual” Design As is often said and written, the history of programming, and programming language design, is about programs becoming more expressive, fluent, lingual. All of the Object Oriented programmers I know and trust most would say that when they program, they are creating what are, in effect, languages. So, [...]
Simple “Clean Code” Metrics for C-Level Execs A recent Twitter thread I was involved in goes something like this. Someone claimed that software managers and executives should not have to care whether their developers are test-driving Clean Code. They should be able to presume that their developers are always courageous, disciplined, and skillful enough to [...]
Enterprise Software Blight I get hired to help teams learn agile software development practices. Most of the practices in my tool bag — not all, but most — come from experience, books, articles, blogs, conferences that focus mainly on greenfield development. And as an agile consultant pal of mine, Mike Hill, says, “First step when [...]
Filed Under: Seriously Cheap Wins Why this is true, I really do not completely understand. I want to understand it, and not judge it, but I admit I have difficulty there. In the kinds of companies at which I have been doing agile software development consulting — coaching, mentoring, training, development — over the past [...]
Refactor Your Codebase as You Go, or Lose it to Early Death Also, Scrub Your Teeth Twice a Day Refactoring is badly misunderstood by many software professionals, and that misunderstanding causes software teams of all kinds – traditional and agile – to forgo refactoring, which in turn dooms them to waste millions of dollars. This [...]
One thing I find repeatedly in dysfunctional software development shops is managers and executives who, instead of encouraging and enabling their staff to form healthy, cohesive, high-function, self-organizing, fulltime project teams or product teams, essentially ask everyone to be part-time members of lots of teams. They micromanage everybody’s workweek, or worse yet, workday. This means [...]
I’m trying to meter my rants — to restrict myself to a certain number per, say, 10 blogs. But here comes another one. Here and there in the blogosphere you see folks claiming that the agile software revolution (or evolution, or paradigm shift, or whatever) is somehow over, irrelevant. You see folks claiming that mainstream [...]
Your Heads-Down Cubicle-Dwellers are Mostly Wasting Their Time This one has a “rant” tag, because it’s not a friendly post. I have seen too much pain and needless waste resulting from this problem at various large enterprises. The larger the percentage of their workdays your individual programmers spend heads-down in their cubicles, cranking away on [...]