Tag: Agile
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Recycling tests in TDD
The standard way that TDD is described is as Red-Green-Refactor: Red: write a failing test Green: get it to pass as quickly as possible Refactor: improve the design, using the tests as a safety net Repeat TL;DR; I’ve found that step 1) might be better expressed as: Red: write a failing test, or make an…
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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…
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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,…
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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,…
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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…