A couple days ago I spoke at the Beyond Agile group meeting on the topic of “Recognizing Software Debt”. Early in the presentation we ran an exercise to get a feel for the effects of software debt that was original created by my friend, Masa Maeda. Here is a link to the exercise: http://www.agilistapm.com/understand-technical-debt-by-playing-a-game/ The [...]
Archives for Open Source
Example Facilitation of Agile Adoption Strategy Session
More than a year ago I was training and consulting with a company that was deciding how to adopt Agile software development methods across all of their teams in the organization after some successful pilots. After a 2-day private Scrum course we decided to use the 3rd day to run a workshop on how to [...]
Automated Promotion through Server Environments
To get towards continuous deployment, or even continuous validated builds, a team must take care of their automated build, test, analyze, deploy scripts. I always recommend that you have 2 scripts: deploy rollback And that these scripts are used many times per iteration to reduce the risk of surprises when deploying to downstream server environments, [...]
Using Sonar Metrics to Assess Promotion of Builds to Downstream Environments
For those of you that don’t already know about Sonar you are missing an important tool in your quality assessment arsenal. Sonar is an open source tool that is a foundational platform to manage your software’s quality. The image below shows one of the main dashboard views that teams can use to get insights into [...]
SeaSPIN Lightning Talk from Last Night
Thanks to Jeremy Lightsmith, the lightning talk I did last night at SeaSPIN on Portfolio Management and Software Debt was caught on video. The talk went over 5 ills that you might see in software projects that can affect strategic planning and some ways that can help identify the ills more quickly for planning purposes. [...]
Extreme Feedback from My Tools – Part 1: Maven 2 Configuration
For many years now, it has been a goal of mine to get feedback as early as possible when developing software. Past blog entries here and here have discussed how we can approach increased feedback. A tweet from Jason Gorman mentioned his list of tools that provide continuous feedback on his code and design: “Emma, [...]
HOWTO: Maven + StoryTestIQ + Selenium RC
StoryTestIQ is an automated acceptance testing tool, which was originally a mashup of 2 existing open source projects, Selenium and FitNesse. StoryTestIQ is many times shortened to STIQ (pronounced “stick”) so it rolls off the tongue more easily. STIQ takes the idea of testing inside the browser a la Selenium and enables editing, tagging, and [...]
