Category: Software development
What's in a name?
April 24, 2007
There seems to be a flurry of post-agile activity on blogs right now. If you haven’t noticed, you can look at an example here. There is more elsewhere, and Jonathan Kohl tells me there is more coming. What this amounts to is a growing number of people who, for a variety of reasons, have a […]
Sorry!
April 17, 2007
I thought I was done with ranting about automation tools for a while, but I couldn’t resist this quote from my former boss’ blog: “Tools that let programmers create software by manipulating icons and graphics shapes on screen have a long and sometimes successful history… But these have generally served as layers of shortcuts on […]
Requirements analysis thought process walkthrough…
March 28, 2007
Michael has moved to a new city, and is obviously free of social distractions. That, or there’s something physically stopping him from playing World of Warcraft. Anyway, he’s blogging again and his latest entry (http://www.ruschena.org/michael/?p=107) on writing technical requirements is well worth a read.
And if you think YOU are in documentation hell…
February 19, 2007
Spare a thought for the people that recently hired my friend Steve, as you read about his latest job (in the second last paragraph): http://cramdogg.blogspot.com/2007/02/watching-printer-101.html
Models of software development
January 16, 2007
After an email exchange with Matt Heusser, Matt has posted my comments on how our work tools sometimes influence our behaviour on projects. That’s because these work tools are based on models of how someone believe software should be developed. Perhaps more importantly, the tools that I’ve seen are usually designed to ensure that the […]
Investing for maintenance – Tradeoffs and calculations
January 10, 2007
In the context-driven software testing Yahoo group, there has been an interesting thread on magic numbers. Part of this discussion related to magic numbers for software maintenance investment. While I think you can find plenty of literature that advises a bias towards maintenance, my friend Michael couldn’t find any models that satisfied our burning questions, […]
Sure, it's a developer's world, but still?
March 14, 2006
One more word on XP as methodology (well, a few more actually). Any methodology seems to me to be a snapshot of a solution to a particular problem that somebody solved at some point, with a particular set of people and skills in a specific context. There are occasional statements flying around the agile-testing group […]
The practice of simplicity (or Methodology perils)
February 13, 2006
Michael Bolton talks about the perils of simplicity in XP, especially when it comes to defining the word ‘work’. I’ve shared some ‘perils of XP’ conversations with Michael of late, so I wanted to consider my experiences on the topic. One thing that strikes me about software methodologies is that like many things which are […]
Valuing early feedback – Why wait until the end?
June 7, 2005
I suspect that my boss has helped focus this thought for me.� I began wondering about why people wait until finishing something before seeking feedback.� Underlying assumptions behind checking something at the end might be – – that you’re going to get it right first time. – that nobody knows better than you do. – […]
Values
January 14, 2005
Jon Eaves was blogging about problems related to development goals not aligning with business objectives and it resounded with some thoughts I had been having on company values. In addition to goal alignment, I’m thinking at the moment that alignment of values is equally important, or at the very least it helps when the true […]