Dusting off Rework
My current contract ends in a few more days so I’m taking the opportunity to dust off my worn copy of Rework by 37 signals. I have to make a long overdue thanks to Craig Davidson, an outstanding agile developer I encountered in a previous engagement. It’s not a traditional agile book by any means, […]
Enterprise Agile – Evolutionary Standards
At the risk of being lambasted by the agile community I will use the words enterprise and agile in the same sentence 😉 This article largely follows on from some previous entries and in particular my entry on user centred test driven development. It is often a complaint that large organisations trundle along painfully and […]
Vision >= Solution >= Problem
I’ll admit it, I’m not 100% agile since I tend to like solutions. I would prefer a problem to solve, but if a problem is intangible I often find a solution is a great way to explore the potential and help express the underlying problem. It is worth noting that innovation and invention are solutions […]
The Real Value of Test First is the Thought Process
Thanks to a colleague at emergn I’m left questioning the real value of TDD.
Big Red Button
Here’s my little user story: As a blogger, I want to use Threely as my url shortener. So that I get more letters on Twitter. Pretty simple story, and also very simple to implement, but impossible to test? I can certainly test the API to twitter, but given I use a wordpress plugin (developed by […]
Qualities of a Good Developer?
It is often quoted that a good developer can be up to 10 times more productive than an average developer, so how can you tell whether a developer is good or not?
Should I Bother?
You’ve never done agile before and you work on a legacy system which is extremely fragile and bug-ridden. I’m guessing quite a few developers will be able to identify with this scenario. Does this mean agile is a no-go? On the contrary, applying agile techniques will probably make it easier to fix those bugs, faster and in the process improve the code just a little bit.
