Two ways to react

Every organisation that makes software, makes mistakes. Sometimes, despite everybody’s best efforts, you end up releasing a bug into production. Customers are confused and angry; stakeholders are panicking. Despite the pressure, you knuckle down and fix the bug. Now it gets interesting: you have to deploy your fix to production. Depending on how your organisation …

Thinking outside the shu box

I just got back from the fantastic Lean Agile Scotland conference, where I spoke about why agile fails. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this year since The Cucumber Book came out, consulting and training different companies in BDD. A pattern I keep seeing are companies who adopted agile a few years ago but …

Our Consumer Culture and What it Means for Software Craftsmanship

We have an old Kenwood Chef A701 that’s hardly out of use in our kitchen. A few days ago, the gearbox went. I bought a reconditioned one on Ebay for £23, and this morning I made the time to do the repair. As I tinkered away with my screwdriver, I reflected on how grateful I …

Hi-Fidelity Project Management

If the only metric you use for measuring and forecasting your team’s progress is their iteration velocity, you’re missing out on a great deal of richer information that, for just a few extra minutes per day, you could easily be collecting. This is information that the team can use during the iteration to help spot …

Don’t Confuse Estimates with Commitments

Estimate: an approximate calculation of quantity or degree or worth Commitment: the act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action Estimates are not commitments. Plans based only on estimates are bad plans. Commitments based only on estimates are at best foolish, at worst dishonest. Estimates are certainly a useful tool for …

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 …

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.