Getting Agile

In the agile community there are some common practices that are either seen as valuable or to be avoided. Two of those practices are estimation using Planning Poker and Sprint Planning task breakdown. The focus for many teams in these practices is on the estimates themselves and how “accurate” they are. It has been my [...]

For the second time I find myself approving of a Daily Stand-up that is longer than 15 minutes.   This is different than a Daily Meeting that is declared complete and then a problem solving session (often with only part of the team) takes place while the issues are fresh in people’s minds.
Meet Carrie (pretend that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This is Joe’s story.  Joe told me his story at the end of the day after observing a team using Agile release planning techniques to create a plan both the team and management could commit to.
Joe said, “Brent, as I watched this event unfold, I kept thinking about when I was a Honda motorcycle tester [...]

Brent Barton and I have decided to start a new company called Sterling Barton that will focus on delivering products to market. We have just started this venture and in our spare time have begun development for our first product. The following letter explains our move to separate from SolutionsIQ so that we can concentrate [...]

It has been a while since I have blogged. I apologize and have plenty of good excuses (if there are such things) about why (book, traveling, family time, etc…). I am now back and will be blogging on a more frequent basis in the next few months.
My first blog entry back is about the upcoming [...]

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 [...]

During an interview at the Better Software conference this week, I mentioned that I thought maintaining a single list of work prioritized by the business was important for our industry to improve. The following text is an excerpt, in first draft form, from chapter 2, “Architecture Integrity”, of my upcoming book “Architecture in an Agile [...]

To reduce duplication and rigidity of the programmer test relationship to implementation code, move away from class and methods as the definition of a “unit” in your unit tests. Instead, use the following question to drive your next constraint on the software:
What should the software do next for the user?
The following coding session will provide [...]