Posts tagged with "agile"

"I had a interesting conversation with Kevlin Henney at Øredev regarding the word ‘should’ and its usage in Behaviour Driven Development. Kevlin does not like ‘should’ as he feels it is too vague in many circumstances. And I have to agree with Kevlin. Sometime you are speccing something like “the title of the index page should be ‘blabbr.com - the worlds largest social network’”, which might be something that we will change in the future."

"Jonathan Schwartz writes about finance as a technology business I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he’d cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I’d asked him why - his response has stuck with me. ‘Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can’t win if I don’t have my own team."

"So, you are about to give a lecture on lean software development? Here are a few tips: Do not say that the agile movement came out of the dot-com era. Mentioning the Smalltalk community at least once is a plus. If you name the language that first introduced the notion of object orientation, Simula 67 is a good choice. Do not say that Winston Royce advocated Waterfall. He didn’t Do not claim that all US Government work in the 60’s and 70’s was done in a waterfall fashion."

"Proponents of RUP, the golden methodology of 1998, is trying revamp it as OpenUP. My first reaction is positive - browsing the Work Products I cannot find any required UML diagram. But after a while I get the feeling that they have fixed the implementation without getting the big picture. It is still has four phases, delivering a feature complete project after the transition phase. No lean, incremental deliveries to production, but how could they?"

"Pats posts on team building and coaching are always a refreshing read. His latest on explaining rituals is no different and something I myself is notoriously bad at. (Via Planet TW)"

"I was listening to the podcast of the interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and this one thing struck me. When asked to predict the future, Bill Gates provided some insightful guesses, while Steve Jobs simply answered “I don’t know”. Twice. Steve’s explanation was that five years ago he would not have predicted what we have today, so therefore he does not trust himself to say what the next five years will look like."

"I’ll be traveling to Dallas, Texas this weekend to speak about agile documentation at Valtech Days. I am looking forward to attending other sessions, the rest of the conference is looking really interesting. If you are in the area and want attend the conference, I believe there are still a few seats available."

"Update: Martin Fowler pointed to Jeff Langrs response. It seems Cedric did not give us the full picture. I have edited my post accordingly ~~After attending a less than stellar presentation on TDD,~~Cedric Beust confuses TDD with “Agile” and goes on to tell the world that agile is not good. Let’s have a look, shall we? First of all, tests are not specs. Not even close. Somebody in the audience was quick to give a counter-example to this absurd claim by using a numeric example (‘how do you specify an exponentiation function with a test?"

"Dan North: How simple is too simple?: “Kent Beck advises us to do ‘the simplest thing that could possibly work’, but this is often mistaken for ‘the first thing I could possibly think of’ or even ‘the only thing I know’” Well put. (Via Planet TW.)"

"Thomas Looy: How Long is a Piece of String?: “- Use working software as the only measure of the progress on a project (no more 90% completed tasks); Measure using smaller sized tasks. Smaller tasks give you better measures than larger ones and will also give you a larger sampling of measures that can be used for meaningful statistical evaluations. Smaller tasks are also completed sooner and therefore give you measurements sooner that you can begin to use to extrapolate to a meaningful project complete date."