Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays, page 26
314 essays in the archive
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Builds should never fail! (for long…)
After arriving to work and checking my e-mails I decided to check in on my previous team’s results on the continuous integration system. Guess what? The build had been broken for 10 days! Continuing to develop on top of a broken build is dangerous as typically an error in the build process hides several other …
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How others see Agile/Scrum
In our company we have been going through the agile development transition for 1,5 years. The most interesting part of this transition is to see people’s reaction to the change. Certainly there are negative reactions (a lot) mostly due to lack of understanding or not being able to adapt to a new way of working …
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More Microsoft on Agility
This is one of the 3 (only 3!) points that Kevin Johnson, head of the “Platforms & Services Division” at Microsoft sent in an internal memo. You can read the whole article here. “3. Agility: Lay the foundation for accelerating our pace of innovation, including focusing on ways to improve clarity of decision making, drive …
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Agile Seminar: Team building in Agile projects, Part I
Last week there was the Agile Seminar here in Helsinki. During my talk I promised that I would make the content available so here we go. During the talk and through a story that I told at the start I tried to illustrate the first Agile value. I slightly changed the it’s phrasing from “Individuals …
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Agile Seminar in Helsinki
Last evening (March 17th) we had the third Agile Seminar arranged by Lasse Koskela (correction: I should also mention that many other people were involved in the organization of the seminar, indeed they were, and a big thanks to them also for this great event!) Three talks, one of them by yours truly (The role …
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Agile Documentation or Time to cut down on the Salt
Who ever needs the information writes the document I’ve heard many times the old adage: “You need to document it properly first to be able to code it later. That’s why you need architects and designers that prepare the documents that programmers will base their work on.” Surely the people that say this don’t mean …
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The natural laws of software development
When Newton “uncovered” the natural laws of motion he was just formalising something that was known but not formally understood at that time. The software industry is going through the same “uncovering” or natural laws and XP is our Newton. During many years the practices advocated by XP (Integrate often, Unit test, Collective code ownership, …
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What if writing code would be like writing a novel?
On the field of analogies here is one that is quite well presented: Writing code is like writing a novel. Check it out at Kevin Barnes‘ blog. Analogies are only useful if they give insights on the activities you are studying, like coding as part of software development in my case. This one is simple …
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Software development as film making
And to prove that I’m not original :), here is a post where the analogy between software development and film making is made.
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Waste and the methodology-police
Old-school methodologies grow until they become the proper goal of the software development process. When an old-school methodology is created, a set of rules come into existence. Those rules are believed to make the software development process successful as promised by: Professors, Consultants, MBA’s, etc.Since those methodologies come with such a high recommendation they obviously …
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Repeatability in software development (or why people are important)
Software development processes try to achieve the impossible: “repeatable success despite who implements them”. How about this thought: Repeatability comes from people, not from processes. Why? Software development processes are procedural rules to follow when developing software. Let’s, for the sake of argument, ignore the fact that those rules rarely focus on the actual work, …
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The uncertainty principle in software development
While surfing the web I came across this post from Kevin Barnes. It’s hilarious! Great insights can be easily conveyed through humour! 🙂 From now on you can use this to say: “You either have software requirements or the actual software, it’s proven by scientists!”
Nothing matches that yet.
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