Tag: commentary

Black hat innovation

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A black keyboard, the favourite tool for black hat innovation

Sometimes, it might seem as if black hat innovation out paces white hat innovation. Whenever there is innovation or invention there is also misuse. As a colleague once put it: “where there is encryption, there is also decryption”.

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Agile is NOT new and not enough

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So people keep talking about the Agile – Waterfall dichotomy. About agile and un-agile practices. I decided to have an unscientific look at what Agile isn’t. If there is a true dichotomy between Agile and Waterfall, then things opposite of Agile should be either entirely out of scope for projects…

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I am Sure Agile is Fine, but…

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Have you ever heard someone say “I am sure agile is fine but it would not work with X”? Jim Elvidge busts some of these myths. Steve Rogalsky has a go at some of the same myths. Does Agile suck?

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Do We Listen too Much to the “Business”?

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Yesterday I watched a documentary on National Geographic about the infamous Sampoong Dept Store Collapse. It immediately got me thinking of some of the threads running here on testing and the business case for testing. In Agile and in our industry in general we always say that fulfilling business requirements…

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Agile Developers Trust their Teams

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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…

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Eclipse Programmers Should Avoid the IROP Keys

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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…

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Agile Adoption – Drivers and Detractors

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Why do, or don’t, organizations adopt agile practices? Vijayasarathy and Turk study this issue in a paper published less than a month ago. They found that perceived norms and training are significant factors in promoting adoption of agile methods. Perceived benefits – such as the fact that TDD really does…

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Benefits of Kanban

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In a recent, well written but smallish study, a team of researchers from Finland have tried to find where KanBan has benefits. In their setup, teams of master students were instructed to use KanBan in their software development projects and then interviewed about their subjective perception of the benefits of…

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Experienced Pair Programmers Write Better Code

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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…

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The World Quality Report

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The World Quality Report is the result of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini, Sogeti and HP Software. The report is based on a global survey of more than 1,200 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, IT directors/managers and quality assurance directors/managers from around the world.

My employer publishes a lot of reports on the state of the world as experienced by our customers. One of those are the World Quality Report. Today I had a really interesting and rewarding lunch with one of the experts behind the report!