Category: Agile

  • Diamond recycling (and painting yourself into a corner)

    Diamond recycling (and painting yourself into a corner)

    The post I wrote recently on recycling tests in TDD got quite a few responses. I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to some of the points that got raised. Do we really need to use the term “recycling”? The TDD cycle as popularly taught includes the instruction to “write a failing test”. The point…

  • User Story Mapping

    User Story Mapping

    I’ve been reading Jeff Patton’s work online for years, learning from his ideas and approaches. You’ve probably come across his Mona Lisa analogy for iterative and incremental development – and if you haven’t this is a good time to go and read it 😉 Well, he has just released a book, User Story Mapping, and…

  • To TDD or not to TDD? That is not the question.

    To TDD or not to TDD? That is not the question.

    Over the past few days a TDD debate has been raging (again) in the blog-o-sphere and on Twitter. A lot of big names have been making bold statements and setting out arguments, of both the carefully constructed and the rhetorically inflammatory variety. I’m not going to revisit those arguments – go read the relevant posts,…

  • The most important change you can make to help your team succeed

    The most important change you can make to help your team succeed

    How busy are you? Are you close to a deadline? Is the team feeling pressure? Every team I visit seems to be under the same heavy workload, and consequently has a lot of improvements to the process, the environment, the technology that they can’t quite get to yet. They know they need to get to them,…

  • 5 rules of continuous delivery

    5 rules of continuous delivery

    Inspired by Sandi Metz’s BaRuCo 2013 presentation “Rules” (which you should watch if you haven’t yet) I started thinking about whether there were some  rules that might be useful in the continuous delivery domain to “screen for cooperative types”. I came up with these as a starting point: Check in everything – we’re used to…

  • Continuous delivery – the novel

    Continuous delivery – the novel

    I find myself recommending the same books over and over again. When speaking to techies I invariably recommend GOOS; when speaking to managers The Mythical Man Month or Waltzing With Bears. Over the past year or two, I’ve also pointed a lot of organisations at Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley. It’s an…

  • Eat your own dogma food

    Eat your own dogma food

    The software development community experiences fad after fad. Consultants and thought leaders dream up new methodologies; old practices are relabelled and promoted as the next big thing; flame wars are fought over names, tabs and brace position. One of the few practices that has stood the test of time is that of “eating your own…

  • Aslak’s view of BDD, Cucumber and automated testing

    Aslak’s view of BDD, Cucumber and automated testing

    This is a quote from Aslak Hellesoy on the Cukes Google group. “Even on this list, the majority of people seem to think that Cucumber == Automated Tests == BDD, which is WRONG. What people need to understand is: Cucumber is a tool for BDD Cucumber is a tool for Specification By Example Specification By…

  • The context and definition challenge

    The context and definition challenge

    We’re very good at rationalising. Almost any statement can be justified by the retroactive application of the twin constraints of “context” and “definition.” As an example, Chris Matts (@papachrismatts) talked about the “death of Agile” in a recent blog post of his, and I took issue with that. We talked about it briefly at a…

  • Tax or investment – which do you prefer?

    Tax or investment – which do you prefer?

    I was working with a client last week who were trying to fit some new technical practices into their daily routine. The way they were trying to ‘account’ for this in their iteration planning was by introducing a 10% ‘tax’ on their velocity. In other words, they were reducing the number of story points that…