About the Agile Mindset

What makes Agile Software Development methods different from Traditional Software Development methods? There are the obvious answers related to different techniques used, e.g. early integration rather than late integration or dividing the problem space from the client perspective (user stories) rather than the technology perspective (client-middleware-database). But essentially the major…

Continue reading

Fake or Real Agile?

Seems the last few days have been full of discussions about what is fake and what is real. A Facebook friend posted an image of a hunter, an elk and a cougar. Turns out it is fake. I read in the newspaper about how larger clothes manufacturers send “samples” of…

Continue reading

Legacy Code

Legacy Code… We all love to hate it. We all have it. Some of us keeps creating it. How do you deal with it once you have it? Sometimes we find problems with it. But then, what do we do? A colleague at Capgemini, Paul Oldfield, suggested I should read…

Continue reading

Criticism… Not All That Easy

Criticism is not all that easy. If you have been through any kind of management training you will probably have done a number of sessions on giving “constructive feedback” or something like that. The trick to remember is that we want to achieve an effect. We want to change the person we are giving the feedback to. Does criticizing make that happen for you? No, there is no such thing as constructive criticism.

What can you do instead? Try giving yourself, your colleagues, your customers and whom ever else you meet professionally positive feedback. No one is so bad that there is nothing you can appreciate about them. Tell them about it. Most people don’t so your opinion will be all the more welcome.

Developing a winning Culture the Zappos way!

http://business901.podbean.com/mf/feed/9kf25k/Zappos.mp3

Continue reading

Attending Speech about Agile RUP

I am attending a great speech by Julian Holmes on Agile RUP.

Continue reading

Agile Developers Trust their Teams

Four people using each others as support form a small spiral.

Yesterday, I wrote about the methodological challenges of correlation based research on software artefacts. The article which is the base for this post also has a fundamental methodological flaw. McHugh, Conboy and Lang have perfomed a post hoc study of trust in agile software development teams where they asked the…

Continue reading

Eclipse Programmers Should Avoid the IROP Keys

In a brilliant and hilarious article Zeller, Zimmerman and Bird points out how easy it is to find correlations when mining software archives. In the article, their (mock) argument is that all program errors must enter the source code through the keyboard and thus certain keys introduce more errors. By…

Continue reading

Alan Shalloway discusses the state of Agile!, part 1 of 3

http://business901.podbean.com/mf/feed/3a7z8y/AlanShallowaypart1of3.mp3

Experienced Pair Programmers Write Better Code

According to a recent study by Andreas Höfer, experienced pair programmers write better code than novice pair programmers. This is in line with a study by Hannay et al. from last year where the researchers found that experience was a key performance predictor in pair programming. It is interesting to…

Continue reading