At XP Day 2008 I proposed an open-space session on pair programming. Specifically, I wanted to explore the reasons why programmers might not want to pair, or find it such an unpleasant experience that they’re put off doing it again. Judging by the great number of people who turned up and stayed for the session, …
Tag Archives: agile
Slides from XP Day Talk
I’m just back from this year’s XP Day, London. Thanks to everyone who came and packed out the room to hear Rob and I talking about our experiences evolving our team from Scrum to Kanban. The slides are here. There’s also a great transcript of the talk here on Tom Hume’s blog. Thanks Tom!
DRY up your Cucumber Steps
Update (13th Jume 2012): This is an old, old post that still gets a lot of hits. I don’t recommend this practice anymore. Instead, I recommend composing Ruby methods that carry out these actions. For more details, please see The Cucumber Book. A while back, I asked the Cucumber team for the ability to call …
“Total Programming” and the XP Team
Pair programming brings a great many benefits to a team that’s truly mastered it. Those of us who are lucky enough to have experienced working on a really effective XP team know about that almost magical thing that starts to happen when the barriers between different members of the team break down, egos and code …
I am Extreme
I going to be speaking (with my good friend Rob Bowley) at the forthcoming XP Day conference in London, 11th & 12th December 2008. Which means that I am now officially extreme. Dude. Come to my talk if you want to hear my experiences of breaking a team out of the Scrum mould and doing …
Is the Value Fetish Killing Agile Teams?
Last weekend I was at CITCON Europe, a great opportunity to meet some of the leading minds in the agile software movement. One intriguing new term I heard a few times was “value fetish”. Let me try to explain what I think it means, and discuss the implications for agile teams.
Scrabbling up the Learning Curve
A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers. I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft’s .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn’t answer quickly and confidently, drawing …
Come to CITCON
Some people think there is no conference for those of us who care about CI and testing, but oh yes there is. As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, like me, realise that continuous integration and testing are to software development what the spirit level and the plumb-line are to the …
Story Driven Development – Just Another *DD?
Bryan Helmkamp, who maintains the handy little library webrat, did a talk recently at GoRuCo 2008 which explains his experiences using RSpec plain-text stories to build ruby-on-rails applications in a manner he calls ‘Story Driven Development’: Before code is written, the team produces executable scenarios for a user story.
9 Techniques to Save you from the Bug-Swamp
How many unresolved bugs are there in your system right now? Yes, yes, smarty-pants: the ones you already know about. Ten? Fifty? Two hundred? More?! I find it frighteningly common to see teams let a huge backlog of bugs build up. They set up a trusted system like Jira or Bugzilla and then use it …
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