Getting Agile

Tomorrow at 1:30pm I will be discussing my paper published by the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2009 in Portland, OR on “Managing Software Debt: Continued Delivery of High Value as Systems Age”. I have uploaded the slides for this presentation and I hope that some of the new content will help those looking for [...]

Earlier this year I did a presentation on Executable Specficiations for AgilePalooza conference. There is information about working with legacy code, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems, and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) using automated acceptance testing tools. Also, the presentation lists types of automated acceptance testing tools out there along with actual names of tools and what [...]

I have uploaded the talk I did at SD West 2009 on Yahoo! Video and here it is:
Managing Software Debt – Chris Sterling @ SD West 2009 @ Yahoo! Video

The hopefully-not-anticlimatic second event of the still-pretty-new BeyondAgile is happening on Thursday:
“Agile Challenges Clinic/Swap Meet”
Thursday, 26 March 2009
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Locations on the Eastside and Seattle!
Read on for agenda and location information, or visit our Google Group at
http://groups.google.com/group/beyondagile
The Blurb
At the first event, everyone (over forty people) created a backlog of ideas, suggestions, and work items. [...]

On November 6th I presented an updated version of the Managing Software Debt talk at Agile Vancouver “Much Ado About Agile” conference. This is a link to the presentation deck:
Managing Software Debt – Agile Vancouver (PDF)
I was honored to present at this local conference and had a great time meeting up with old friends and [...]

“Hey, Ben. We just figured out a great way to manage test-driven development and good database design.”, said an enthusiastic developer using Extreme Programming (XP) practices on their project. “Our application is highly data-centric. Therefore, in the first iteration we design the database schema modifications and create tests to validate all of it’s implementation characteristics. [...]

A few years ago I was privileged to be on a team with some excellent developers where I currently work, SolutionsIQ. One of whom saw the need to stabilize development on an incredibly unstable codebase with no tests. He came to the team with a proposed tool that he slapped together in his free time. [...]

Last week I was invited to participate in a LAWST-style workshop on Technical Debt. I was honored to be there with such a great group of people from diverse industries and experiences.
Preface: I am writing this blog entry for myself and therefore it may not be as useful to those reading. Also, the perspective on [...]

One of the most common questions in teaching and coaching agile processes to groups is:
“How do we design our software while delivering iterations of potentially shippable product increments?”
Scrum, an agile process that I teach about and coach organizations on implementation of, asks that each Sprint, analogous to an iteration, delivers a potentially shippable product increment. [...]

Larry L. Peterson, professor and Chair of Computer Science, Princeton University, gave a great talk on PlanetLab: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design which I believe is interesting to people involved in emerging architecture. One of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development’s principles is:
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Remember this principle while [...]