Category: Agile
-
Unit tests are your specification
Recently a Schalk Cronjé forwarded me a tweet from Joshua Lewis about some unit tests he’d written. . @ysb33r I’m interested in your opinion on how expressive these tests are as documentation https://t.co/YpB1A3snUV /@DeveloperUG — Joshua Lewis (@joshilewis) December 3, 2015 I took a quick look and thought I may as well turn my comments…
-
Flatulent agile
Recipes I’ve been working with a number of larger, older organisations recently and it has really brought home to me the difference between the promise of a nimble, responsive teams and the reality of a sluggish, bureaucratic behemoth. Then, looking back over years of writings, posts, promises and dreams I see frequent repetitions of the phrase…
-
Branching and Continuous Delivery video discussion
Following on from my previous post and discussions online, we arranged a Google Hangout to discuss things in more detail. I was joined by Dave Farley, Lars Kruse, Olve Maudal and Mike Long and you can watch the unedited video here: I don’t think we reached any agreement and after the video ended Olve suggested…
-
BCS: Agile Foundations
Preconceptions challenged I really wanted to dislike this book, and in some respects I managed to achieve my goal. This is a book published to support yet another spurious agile certification (YASAC?), and I really don’t like that. The authors continuously use ‘Agile’ as a capital-A, noun, rather than the lower-case-a adjective that it clearly ought…
-
Making a meal of architectural alignment and the test-induced-design-damage fallacy
Starter A few days ago Simon Brown posted a thoughtful piece called “Package by component and architecturally-aligned testing.” The first part of the post discusses the tensions between the common packaging approaches package-by-layer and package-by-feature. His conclusion, that neither is the right answer, is supported by a quote from Jason Gorman (that expresses the essence…
-
Rolling Rocks Downhill
It’s almost a year since I posted a glowing review of “The Phoenix Project” – a business novel, following in the footsteps of Goldratt’s “The Goal”, about continuous delivery. If you haven’t yet read it, then I’m going to recommend that you hold fire, and read “Rolling Rocks Downhill” by Clarke Ching instead. I should…
-
Always Be Coding
Last night I finally got around to watching Erik Meijer’s keynote from last year’s Reaktor conference. It was called “One Hacker Way” and, while it contains much that is apocryphal – or at least wildly inaccurate – it scores over the older, more pedestrian type of keynote in two important ways: first it is highly contentious,…
-
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
From http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/explore/reduce/: Three great ways YOU can eliminate waste and protect your environment! Waste, and how we choose to handle it, affects our world’s environment—that’s YOUR environment. The environment is everything around you including the air, water, land, plants, and man-made things. And since by now you probably know that you need a healthy environment for…
-
Do you practice BDSA?
I get to visit a lot of teams. I talk to my peers about their experiences too. For every agile success story there seem to be a load of less happy outcomes. There are three common ways that I’ve seen agile ‘adoption’ go wrong, and they are: Bondage – “You can never change the business. That’s…
-
Half a glass
Is this glass half empty or half full? There’s normally more than one way to interpret a situation, but we often forget that the situation itself may be under our control. I often find my clients have backed themselves into a corner by accepting an overly restrictive understanding of what they’re trying to achieve. They will tell…