Seb’s blog
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Value by association
Do you care what label is on your shirt? Or your car? Or your laptop? I bet you do, but why? Is there something substantive underneath the fashion-victim facade or is it just some sort of post-modern tribalism? A few of us have been debating the death (or otherwise) of agile, and it seems to…
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Death of agile – Intro
Welcome to the “Death of agile” series. Most of these posts take the form of open letters to members of the community, but this introductory post sets the stage and outlines my understanding of what agile is, and where it fits into the pantheon of software development methods. See also: Open letter to Dan North…
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Gabriel Steinhardt – an open letter
Welcome to another post in my “Death of agile” series. This post is an open letter to Gabriel Steinhardt, a Product Management expert from Blackblot. See also: Death of agile Open letter to Dan North Open letter to Chris Matts Dear Gabriel, In your keynote at Agile On The Beach and your subsequent blog post…
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Chris Matts – an open letter
Welcome to another post in my “Death of agile” series. This post is an open letter to Chris Matts, the ‘father’ of Real Options and Feature Injection and co-parent of BDD. See also: Death of agile Open letter to Dan North Open letter to Gabriel Steinhardt Dear Chris, I recently came across one of your…
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Dan North – an open letter
Welcome to another post in my “Death of agile” series. This post is an open letter to Dan North, the ‘father’ of BDD. See also: Death of agile Open letter to Chris Matts Open letter to Gabriel Steinhardt Dear Dan, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about some of your recent conference keynotes, specifically…
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Introducing 2nd party
It’s always a good idea to wrap any component that we don’t own behind an interface that we do own. There are a number of benefits: 1) We can tailor/narrow the interface to expose only the behaviour that we need 2) When we choose to change the external component, we’ll only have to modify the…
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Rejecting CDD
One of the 12 agile principles is: “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” Indefinitely. Wow, that’s a long time!* How will we ever know if we’ve delivered on this principle? Well, we won’t. We’ll only know when we fail to deliver – when team…
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Be pure. Be vigilant. Behave.
There has been a bit of traffic on the Growing Object Oriented Software (GOOS) mailing list recently about how many tests you should write, and what sort they should be. Understandably it got back to the perennial discussion about what constitutes a unit test, what an integration test, what an acceptance test. And where does…
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Simpler. Clearer. Faster.
The UK Government has invested £17 million over the past 2 years migrating from several rather old websites to the new, shiny gov.uk website. James Stewart and Anna Shipman gave an uplifting talk at the Edinburgh BCS branch meeting on May 1st, describing how they had scaled from one small team of 12 to ten…
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On alcoholism, chainsaws and deliberate practice
I’ve been running a lot of training courses recently and I’ve noticed that once people have chosen where they’re going to sit, they return to that position every day. We are creatures of habit, and some habits seem to form very quickly. If I rearrange the room before the second day, or ask people to…
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