Entries Tagged 'Agile' ↓

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 Software [...]

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 how it’s defined.
An empirical process [...]

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 and [...]

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 curious [...]

In order to embrace the true Christmas spirit, I thought I’d share a few goodies from the Devoxx conference that took place in Antwerp, Belgium in mid December. Devoxx is the former JavaPolis that has changed name due to trademarking issues with Sun. Nonetheless, it’s still the worlds largest independent Java conference, where the 3200 [...]

So we have a recipy for the team. But this is just not enough. We need to make sure that management and everyone else is on board. The second part of the Scrum Shock Therapy presents a bootstrapping recipe on how you can do this.
The first part of this series can be found here: Scrum [...]

The Øredev conference was a real success. I’m involved in it ,so that probably makes me biased:-). However, I struggled for the first 10 minutes of my presentation to get my slides on the projector. A tip for you Mac users out there: Plug the adapter (dmi to vga) into the VGA cable first! I [...]

Just a quick note on Scrum Shock Therapy. I will give a session on this subject at the Øredev conference on Tuesday at around 10 o’clock. If you can make it I will talk about the whole shebang – recipes for the team, management and organisation.
I’d love to get your feedback. See you in [...]

Scrum consists of a straightforward process, half a bunch of roles and a few artifacts. Sounds simple enough, but according to an online poll 3 out of 4 projects that call themselves Scrum fail to implement even the simplest parts. To make matters worse, most of the mistakes are on the simple side of things. [...]