Although Agile testing techniques have helped us to create higher quality software, many software developers still spend significant amounts of time debugging their own or other people’s software. Some of the most difficult software to debug is code that has “evolved” over time in a mostly arbitrary way. The software is not well structured or … Read more
Some my earlier comments have been described as a “backlash” against agile software development. It’s definitely not a backlash against agile software development techniques or goals, but more about the rigid attitudes I see in some branches of the agile community (mostly from a relatively small, but very vocal, group of XP evangelists). This rigidity … Read more
There seems to have been a recent increase in discussion around the definition of “agility” in a software development context. For example Brad Appleton has offered a definition of business agility. Business agility and software development agility seem to me like two different, although related, concepts but the post and comments are interesting. Brad also blogged … Read more
XP emphasizes radically collocated teams sitting together in a shared workspace. Some of the XP thought leaders claim that anything less than that will cause significant reductions in productivity. In some situations that may be true but it hasn’t always been my experience when I’ve worked on distributed teams. The productivity claim seems to be … Read more
Back in 1997, Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder wrote about The Selfish Class. Their paper was focused on software artifacts, mostly at the class or class library level but I believe the patterns also describe how application usage spreads. According to Foote and Yoder… THE SELFISH CLASS pattern examines how the sociobiological notion that evolving artifacts … Read more
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. — Alfred Adler David J. Anderson has recently stated the opinion that trust is the essence of agile development methods. He says that trust is more of what agile is all about than short feedback loops and a focus on people as … Read more
XPlanner was originally developed to support a distributed XP team. This team had been using note cards successfully for over a year but a key stakeholder had been required to travel extensively and they wanted to monitor the development progress. Later, we used XPlanner as part of a larger tool suite to support distributed developer … Read more
Laurent Bossavit asks if developers have seen the following effects when rewriting code from scratch… Rewriting the code takes much less time than the first time around Rewriting the code is a lot easier than the first time around The rewritten code is better factored, more readable than that lost I’ve seen all three of these … Read more
I’m asking the question specifically in the context of software development although it’s useful to consider the meaning of the word in common usage. The dictionary definition of agile is “characterized by quickness, lightness, and ease of movement; nimble” and doesn’t include an important aspect: quality. A quality result achieves the goal of the action producing the … Read more
The conventional wisdom is that defects cost much more, some say exponentially more, the later in the development lifecycle they are found. This is a obvious generalization rather than a universal fact. There are many many variables such as the type of defect, the type of application, the development techniques being used and organizational structure. … Read more