My article, Agile Adoption: Changing Behavior by Asking the Right Questions, has been published over on ProjectManagement.com (free registration required). It talks about when managers want change, but don’t want to squeeze the Agile out by force.
An open letter to a programmer who thinks that code coverage by integration tests eliminates the need for unit tests. Read More
The way we express our estimates color both the way we think about the thing being estimated and the way our estimates are heard. Read More
When we see the same view every day, we get complacent. We no longer notice certain details. Habit, rather than choice, controls many of our behavioral responses. We may be doing fine, but such a limited view doesn’t promote getting any better, and leaves us vulnerable to changes outside our control. Or we may be missing points that are essential to the success we want. Read More
Thanks to Tim Ottinger for reminding me of Arlo Belshee’s post, “Is Pair Programming for Me?” Go read Arlo’s post, as it’s insightful and has more useful content than most articles on pairing. I’m just going to springboard off of one skill that Arlo mentioned being important to learn.
How to avoid “paragraphing” when talking. Learning to speak in half-sentences, leaving room for the other to take the idea in an unexpected direction.
A few years back, I took a course in “Beginning Improv Acting.” Read More
I sometimes see clashes between Kanban proponents and their Scrum counterparts. Despite the disagreements, both of these approaches tend toward the same goals and use many similar techniques. Karl Scotland and I did some root cause analysis of practices a few years back and came to the conclusion that there were a lot of similarities between Kanban and Scrum [as the poster-child of iterative agile] when viewed through that lens. I also noticed that while Scrum explicitly focuses on iterations as a control mechanism, Scrum teams tend get into trouble when they ignore Work In Progress (WIP). Conversely, while Kanban explicitly focuses on WIP, Kanban teams tend to get into trouble when they ignore Cadence.
A twitter conversation I was in revolved around Cycle Time and Velocity. Since this is a topic that’s come up before, I thought it would be valuable to describe it more fully. Again, I find there to be more similarities than differences between Kanban (which uses Cycle Time) and Scrum (which uses Velocity) in terms of predicting when a given amount of work will be done, or how much work will be done by a given time. Read More
I saw that Alistair Cockburn had written a post about Seb Rose’s post on the Diamond Kata. I only read the beginning of both of those because I recognized the problem that Seb described with the “Gorilla” approach that, upon reaching the ‘C’ case.
“The code is now screaming for us to refactor it, but to keep all the tests passing most people try to solve the entire problem at once. That’s hard, because we’ll need to cope with multiple lines, varying indentation, and repeated characters with a varying number of spaces between them.”
I’ve run into such situations before, and it’s always be a clue for me to back up and work in smaller steps. Seb describes that the ‘B’ case, “easy enough to get this to pass by hardcoding the result.” Alistair describes the strategy as “shuffle around a bit” for the ‘B’ case. I’m not sure what “shuffling around a bit” means and I don’t think it would be particularly easy to get both ‘A’ and ‘B’ cases working with constants and not heading down a silly “if (letter == 'A') "¦ elseif (letter == 'B') "¦” implementation. I was curious how I would approach it, and decided to try. (Ron Jeffries also wrote a post on the topic.) I didn’t read any of these three solutions before implementing my own, just so I could see what I would do. Read More
Luis Gonçalves has posted a list of 100 Top Agile Blogs, ranked by Alexa ranking. I’m gratified to make the list, where I’m in some pretty good company.
There are many ways to look at the issue of estimation. Everyone in the business of software development has had experience with wanting estimates, being asked for estimates, or both. That experience frames how they look at the issue. A considerable share of those experiences have been painful. I dare say that everyone in the business has had some painful experiences around estimation, and the painful ones seem to stick in our memory more vividly than the benign ones.
What makes these experiences so painful? Again, the causes are legion. One frequent contributor is well illustrated by a story my older brother taught me as a child.
I just observed yet another conversation on twitter that started with the topic of waste in software development, brought in value as an arbiter between waste and necessity, and then quality as a modulator of value. Surely a practice that increases quality also increases value, and therefore cannot be considered waste.
These discussions seem to spin in circles. They always have, and likely always will. Why? Because they treat quality and value as attributes of what is built, rather than as relationships. I like Jerry Weinberg’s definition in Quality Software Management:Systems Thinking.
“Quality is value to some person.”
This does not bring agreement to the discussions of value and quality. It does bring a different focus to them. Who is the person that matters? I can tell you who that is. Read More