Code Reviews that might actually work

June 4, 2012

Code reviews are a great way of improving code quality, and bruising egos. This article looks at practical ways to do more of the former, and less of the latter.

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Scrum, The Good Bits: The Backlog

April 21, 2012

The sight of a Product Owner given pause for thought when they see a new feature that’s “absolutely crucial” pushing another “absolutely crucial” feature outside of the deadline is one of the most beautiful moments in software development…

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Scrum, The Good Bits: Daily Standups

April 14, 2012

Daily standups are meant to be a communication tool – too often process can take the place of looking at the deeper reasons why we do things in Scrum.

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Scrum, The Good Bits: An Introduction

April 14, 2012

Scrum is a business process, and like any business process, it sits between you and the work you need to get done. If it doesn’t help you get that work done more effectively it’s a big waste of time. Introduction to a series of articles discussing the best pieces of Scrum – the pieces you can steal and start using independently of a wider Scrum implementation.

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How to Remember Everything, Ever and Forever

February 17, 2012

If you work in software, being able to consume and learn large amounts of information is a valuable skill – here’s how to do it. So now you do have time to learn that new language you saw on HackerNews…

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Estimating like an Adult – What to Steal from Agile…

February 16, 2012

Somewhere along the way, Agile gained a bunch of fundamentally good ideas about fixing the estimation process. We’re going to look at what they are, why they’re important, and how to steal them for great profit.

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How to Estimate like an Adult – A Developer’s Guide

February 10, 2012

Usefully estimating software projects is difficult, but not impossible. Developers can end up feeling guilty that they’re not meeting their estimates, and at the same time defensive: what they gave were just estimates after all, right? Managers feel exasperated that everything is taking three times as long as it should. What are the developers doing all day?

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Automatic Generation of Cucumber from Code

December 24, 2011

An approach we took at a client where we automatically generated Cucumber scenarios by empirical analysis of code. Introduces concepts from Design By Contract.

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Agile Scrum: Delivering Broken Software Since 1991

September 28, 2011

Agile Scrum should be an absolute huge win for developers and managers alike. Too often though, when push comes to shove, it devolves in to a brutal machine for killing code quality and irritating developers. This article discusses the right way to fix that, and how activist developers can effect change.

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Test-Driven Development? Give me a break…

September 24, 2011

When I hear someone start advocating Test-Driven Development as the One True Programming Methodology, that’s a red flag. Testing is about giving you the developer useful and quick feedback about if you’re on the right path, and if you’ve broken something, and for warning people who come after you if they’ve broken something. It’s not an arcane methodology that somehow has some magical “making your code better” side-effect…

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