Entries Tagged 'Agile' ↓

I got some positive response about DET that I wrote on my blog and in my CAST session proposal, so I thought I would elaborate a little on where I think this could be going. I will probably cover more hands on aspects in the coming weeks, but I really want to explain a vision I have around [...]

According to this blog entry on Heroku, Clojure becomes the third language officially supported on the Cedar stack, after Ruby and Node.js. They write: – “Clojure combines the expressiveness of Lisp, the agility of a dynamic language, the performance of a compiled language, and the wide applicability of the JVM in a robust, production-ready package. [...]

The Nordic Ruby conference is a really great conference. I think the secret is: it’s small (they set a limit of 150 people which was reached), single track, 15 or 30 min sessions and 30 min breaks, great party and you have lots of time to talk to very passionate speakers and attendants. The quality [...]

I bet you and your great idea are having a fantastic time in Thoughtland. You’ve probably invited some of your friends too, and you’re all tall as trees from the Group Think hookah. No idea what I’m talking about? You have to watch Patrick Copeland’s QCon Keynote video on Pretotyping. Those 43 minutes might just save [...]

Have you ever had too much to do? Did you react by working even harder – like the rest of us? At first, the situation seems to improve and everything looks just fine. However, even though “harder” might lead to “better”, it still is not the same as “good”. Time passes and you keep putting [...]

There are loads of reasons for a tester to love DET. Here I present three reasons for a developer to love it.

At Öredev 2009 I first learned about Christopher Averys responsibility process model in a seminar about agile adoption strategies. The speaker, Amr Elssamadisy, emphasized the importance of having team members with a good sense of responsibility for the project to be successful. Indeed he said that this is often crucial for success. While the responsibility [...]

I can’t take credit for this statement, since I am only drawing the logical conclusion from a statement said by a man far smarter than I. Donald Knuth wrote in his famous paper Structured Programming with go to Statements (PDF): We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: pre-mature optimization is [...]

Continuos Integration is the practice of integrating changes from many people as often as possible. Instead of merging changes once a month and spending time handling merge errors you try integrate every day, perhaps even every hour. Each integration is built and tested on a server. If there are build errors or test failures, you [...]

The analogy of software developers as craftsmen has become very popular. I don’t know where it started, but the first book I read about it was the excellent book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas. I really liked this analogy, it seemed right. A few years later, Pete McBreen released the book [...]

For our new StreamFlow project I wanted to try and get management functions in properly right from the start, which basically means exposing configuration, service management and administrator functions through JMX. I figured that if I did that on my part the customer would simply be able to get a decent JMX console and get their work done efficiently through that.

But then yesterday I did some research into the current state of JMX consoles, and in particular downloaded and tested all the OpenSource consoles in Java. The end result of that is a realization that they all basically suck. There’s no point in naming names, and no point in going into detail, because they all seem to have the same basic problem: the developers haven’t talked to a domain expert.

It’s often said that Scrum is an empirical process so the question is, is that true and if so what does that really mean? Empirical Means that the information is collected by observing, experience or experimenting. Empirical process Is used for handling processes that are complex and not very well understood. So let’s look at [...]

The purpose of Unit Testing is to verify for the developer that a software unit does what it is supposed to and is fit for use. The confidence that the developer gets, gives the developer courage to do other useful practices like Refactoring. Unit testing is often used to test complex units with one or [...]

I’ve just uploaded the slides from the PMI conference in Amsterdam here. Some 150 people turned up for this morning show, a Pecha Kucha with group discussions, about various aspects on Scrum. After some initial wrestling with the audio we got under way. We were four to speak – Juliet Andrew, Gabrielle Benefield, Petri Haapio [...]

Jim “Cope” Coplien is the inventor of Organizational Patterns and author of several books on the subject. Cope currently works as a consultant and is often asked to assist with organizational improvements. Cope is a frequent speaker at conferences and a reoccurring favorite at Øredev. He is a man with strong opinions and I was [...]