One of the several great things about working for my current client is that their high public profile means it’s reasonably easy to get interesting people to come and visit us from time to time. Last week the mighty Martin Fowler dropped by to talk to us.
Category Archives: Agile / Lean Software Development
Awesome Acceptance Testing
My notes on DanNorth and JoeWalnes‘ session at Spa 2008. Five artefacts: Automation – the glue that binds the tests to the code Vocabulary – the language that the tests are expressed in Syntax – the technology that the tests are expressed in (C#, Java) Intent – the actual scenario being tested Harness – the …
Scrum Metaphors: Virus, Bulldozer, Stabilisers
Is scrum a virus? Jason Gorman and Brian Marrick have been pondering on whether that might be a good thing. I have a couple of metaphors of my own for Scrum.
Where Scrum Gets Dangerous: Potentially Shippable? Make Sure You Mean It
Scrum tells you to build ‘potentially shippable’ changes to your product (let’s call them ‘User Stores’) in fixed-length iterations. By estimating the relative complexity of delivering each of these changes using arbitrary units (let’s call them ‘Story Points’) you can measure how much estimated complexity was turned into ‘potentially shippable’ software over a fixed duration. …
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Kanban For Software Explained… Some More.
A while back I alerted you to a post Karl Scotland had written on his implementation of a kanban system for producing software. Kenji Hiranabe has posted a very informative and well-researched article on the InfoQ website which also sheds a great deal of light on the practical application of this exciting emerging practice. Well …
Continue reading “Kanban For Software Explained… Some More.”
Retrospective: The Clue is in the Name
I facilitated our regular end-of-iteration retrospective last week, and although the feedback from the team was positive, I was left with a feeling that something wasn’t right. With our second major live release looming large on the horizon, I focussed the session on the theme of ‘Success’. My aim was to give the team a …
Kanban for Software Explained
Karl Scotland has posted a great description of how his team solved some issues they were having within their Scrum team by moving over to using a lean-thinking or Kanban system, based on a short buffer or Queue of Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs). It’s probably the clearest explanation I’ve seen yet of why and how …
Words Matter: Growing Software
Brian Marrrick makes a good point that ‘incremental’ and ‘iterative’ just look and sound way too similar to make the decent brand-names for ‘evil’ and ‘good’ software development practice respectively. Note to self: say ‘incremental assembly’ (boo!) and ‘iterative growth’ (yeah!). The more I think about it, the more I like the growth vs assembly …
You, Sir, are an Anti-Pattern
Last night in the pub I was introduced to the term ‘corncob’, a label apparently used in some software development circles for a disruptive team member. I’d love to know how on earth that particular word was chosen. I rather dislike this tendency to put people into boxes, as the next obvious step is to …
XP Day 2007
…was good fun, and well worth a couple of days off. There’s a mixed crowd – some die-hard extreme programmers, quite a few self-styled (and self-promoting!) ‘coaches’ and a few newbies. The atmosphere was really friendly – you would quite often find yourself sat in one session right next to the person who had been …