Improving the world with software
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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from 2007
14 essays from 2007
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Function follows form… or results depend on team structure
Dave Nicolette touches upon a subject that has been in my mind lately. Roles, do matter in a software development team. Quoting Conway’s law: the software produced will look like the organization that produced it. Why is this important in the context of Agile teams? Because, if your organizational structure mimics what it was when …
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Opening a new debate, our industry needs to grow…
Agile development practices have caught on lately. Just look at the number of people attending what, some time ago, were “marginal” events like the ScrumGathering. The software industry as a whole is awaking to a new wave of “process improvement”. It’s important to look back in history and understand the previous waves in our industry …
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Why do teams slow down?
So, here you are. You just joined a team, you’re the third or fourth member to join and you feel good. Your team follows an Agile development method. You churn out new functionality and customer-value at the end of every iteration and things could not go any better for you. The product sells, the team …
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Time is up for middle age conceptions of software development
Sometimes it takes time for the full understanding of reality to fall on us. Scratch that. IT ALWAYS TAKES TIME, many times it takes too much time. David is contributing to shorten that itme in at least one item: the road is over for super-specialists in the software industry. You can and should still be …
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Agile brings organizational changes…
David has a good analysis of one the most clear consequences of going Agile. Once the development bottlenecks are solved, the bottleneck moves elsewhere, and in many cases it moves to the organizational structure: read it here.
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Agile implemented with (real) roller skates
Martin Fowler has a great example of what an agile mind would think of to deliver customer value much sooner than what people would normally think. Great example of what the Agile values are about!
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Joel on Software gets close to “a universal truth” software development
The important phrase is at the end of this paragraph… Wow, That’s really on the spot. That’s exactly the same time we saw at our company (average of many projects) a validation/testing/debuging phase takes… when you use waterfall!!!! Lately we’ve got the period from “last feature added” to “release” in a lot less time (no …
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Nokia’s “door” (Ovi in Finnish)
I can’t believe it! How can someone be so ignorant so out of touch with reality so complete absorved on their own petty little half-monopoly to have no clue whatsoever about what makes a web service usable, cool and desirable? Have you checked out Nokia’s Ovi (door in English)? talk about a crappy user experience. …
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A Demo-day smell
While attending a team demo the other day I came accross what I consider a “smell”. A smell is like a sign that something is wrong (from “smells bad but I don’t know where it comes from). The smell is the following, teams get on stage to demo the results of the latest iteration and …
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Patterns of Agile adoption
During XP 2006 in Oulu, Finland. I attended a session jointly hosted by Amr Elssamadisy and Ahmed El shamy on patterns of Agile adoption. There are now a few articles about that and other sessions that Amr has held in other conferences. You can check the paper on “Functional Testing: A Pattern to Follow and …
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Simple estimations work. Use the data you have available
I very often hear the “estimations” conversation. People are so infatuated with the estimations that they forget to look at the actual data. By data I mean what they have been able to accomplish in the past. When we were lost in the dark ages of Waterfall and it’s Linear Pseudo-iterative friends (like RUP) we …
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The law of immediate action on productivity
In Software as in other activities quantity is not a synonym with quality. Here’s what I mean:It is very common for people to think that if they find a lot of bugs in a software before it is released that they know more about the quality level of their software. Normally that requires that you …
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