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Essays from 2006, page 3
50 essays from 2006
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At last, more on the XP 2006 conference
XP 2006 Conference, Day 2 highlights During the second day in the conference I attended the scientific paper session in the morning. Of the three papers presented the most interesting was the one on TDD and the effects it has on how we develop code. The gist of the paper was that in order to …
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Hard value versus System value of Agile Methods
First a clarification. I’ve used “hard” value as opposed to “system” value in this article, and my definitions are:“Hard value”: any value that can be or is systematically quantified in terms of money or time and normally focus on details (e.g. the value of TDD, the value of incremental development).“System value”: any value that can …
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Day 1 at XP 2006 conference, part 2
During the morning session for today I attended the research paper session presentation on “Foundation and rationale for agile methods”. There were four papers: Distributed cognition account of mature XP teams: in this paper presentation the thing that struck me the most was the practice of “fluid pairing” as described by the presenter. In this …
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Day 1 at XP 2006 conference, part 3
The last event for today was the keynote speech by Brian Hanly (acutally it was Sean Hanly who did the keynote, thanks Lasse for the correction), founder and director of Exoftware which is a major sponsor for the conference. His point in the talk was that Agile needs to cross the chasm of adoption from …
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Day 1 at XP 2006 Conference
The day started today with a talk from Pekka Himanen about the Hacker Ethic. His introduction on how the Open Source development teams are able to produce so much and so high quality code was interesting as it was rooted on his Learning Philosophy and how interaction between people can make a team/community much more …
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Highlights of Sunday tutorials on XP 2006 conference
Yesterday was my first actual day in the conference here in Oulu. The day started for me with the tutorial from Mary Poppendieck about Lean (Agile) Software Development. I had read her book and learned from it a lot. In the tutorial she touched on several interesting aspects that are not very obvious from the …
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XP 2006 conference starts
Today started the XP 2006 conference here in Oulu. I have a lot of positive expectations regarding this conference. Reading the proceedings from last year’s conference I got a lot of great ideas to apply in my work, I expect that this year, being present will be even more productive.
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What “done” means and it’s importance.
Today a colleague at work described his experience with one of the principles of Scrum: “Done means done”.This very simple phrase has very deep implications. One is that you are never really done until a feature is ready for release. Some teams will define that differently, but his team defined that “ready for release” meant …
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What is so hard in a retrospective? People.
I’ve been doing retrospectives for a while at work. They have become so useful and part of my understanding of continuous improvement that I’ve started doing them at the end of every meeting or presentation I hold. The point being that I know I can improve, and it’s excellent that I have the opportunity to …
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Self-managing and self-organization in software development teams
Ed Gibbs in his blog posts a comment on self-managing teams that deserves some additions.He mentions that “[he does] have fears that some stuff gets left behind by making everyone a developer [self-managing team]”. He specifically mentions that Most organizations just have a lot of administrative stuff that someone has to take care of to …
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The Feedback Cycle is king!
Agile software development methods are organized around an important concept: the feedback loop. The idea is that whatever you do – coding, attending a meeting, doing a full project – you must have a way to gather feedback about what you did so that you can analyze it and improve based on that analysis. While …
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The complete software process needs to be agile
As a software project manager some of the problems that most puzzled me are related to how we can change the way the development team works with Agile methods to adjust for the parts of the software development organization that are not yet ready for Agile (localization, delivery, documentation, training, support, sometimes even testing). To …
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