Barriers to Acceptance Test-driven Design

August 21st, 2008

Brian Marick weighs in on potential issues with using acceptance test-driven design even where unit-level test-driven development (TDD) is conducted here.

Agile 2008: Converting Business Value into Actual Money - Luke Hohmann

August 21st, 2008

Simon Baker provides his perspective on Luke Hohmann’s Agile 2008 session “Converting Business Value into Actual Money” here.

Acceptance TDD Explained

August 21st, 2008

An early version of a chapter from Lasse Koskela’s “Practical TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers” is available from Methods and Tools here.

Agile Quality: a Canary in the Cole Mine

August 14th, 2008

Ken Schwaber discusses how a Product Owner and the Team should work together in Scrum in this InfoQ video presentation. This topic is in response to a problem that manifests itself in software projects called technical debt because of bad habits Product Owners and Teams pick up during development.

Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Software Organizations

August 12th, 2008

Companies who do not continually evolve their platform seem to inherit problems which can be resolved with just an update.  But they are not able to update due to many reasons that were incorporated over time.  Michael Feathers describes the different type of organizations based on their ability to evolve with the times in this article.

Cargo Cult Methodology: How Agile Can Go Terribly, Terribly Wrong

August 12th, 2008

This article on CIO.com is sub-titled:

Agile methodologies seemed like a good idea to this software development team. But when the company doesn’t sincerely accept the change in work style, the result is just a buzzword for “project hell.”

Become a Better Software Artist

August 12th, 2008

Chris McMahon describes the similarities between becoming a musician and learning develop great software in this article on his blog.

Matt Heusser - My Position on Tech Debt I & II

August 11th, 2008

Matt Heusser describes his ideas around technical debt and how it comes into being along with some ideas on addressing it in these articles: here and here.

Scrum in Practice for Non-believers

August 11th, 2008

A few team members from Tourism Flanders-Dolmen has put together a presentation for Javapolis discussing their experience transitioning to Scrum.  You can find the presentation slides and video here.

Agility and Organizational Patterns

August 1st, 2008

Jeff Sutherland, co-inventor of Scrum, points out the relationship of Scrum to organizational patterns put out by James Coplien in this article.