Musings of a Software Development Manager

Brian Marrick looks back on 5 years since the Agile Manifesto:
I think it no coincidence that so many of the Agile Manifesto authors had past experience with Smalltalk (or, in my case, Lisp). That kind of background makes it easier to think of software as something you could readily change. I don’t think Agile would [...]

Ran my second class on TDD with JUnit today. Now the bulk of our developers have been exposed to TDD directly, but I think there’s still a lot of work to do to nail down real adoption. One of the issues is quite a few people in the class don’t actually get to [...]

One reason, IBM Websphere. Currently the newest version of Websphere 6.0 is only handles 1.4.2. No idea when 7.0 is out and they’ll finally support it. Unfortunately the picture only gets worse from there. There’s no sightings of a 7.0 beta yet. Next you have a dependency on Rational Application [...]

“No, really the standups worked, even with only 3 people they really helped everyone stay in sync.”
This was one one of my more sarcastic developers (sarcasm and software are so often synonymous) explaining that he actually saw value in standup meetings. Given a general hatred for meetings by your average developer it was nice [...]

I sat in on the Sprint Planning meeting with some of my developers today. It was time boxed for 4 hours to do higher level estimates, select the backlog items for the Sprint and agree to commit to them. The second meeting will be Monday for 4 hours where the tasks are broken [...]

In June of 1979, the Ada programming language became a reality ([SIGPLAN, 1979a], [SIGPLAN, 1979b]). The U.S. Department of Defense set up Ada training classes at West Point, the Naval Post Graduate School, Georgia Institute of Technology, the National Physical Laboratory (U.K.), and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
At the Air Force [...]

Cory Foy has a post on evidence from at least one project that unit tests may be in fact free, as long as you do TDD. The point is that they wrote 35,000 lines of source code for a project and 35,000 lines of test code and they delivered in about 9 months with [...]

I tend to follow Yahoo pretty closely since my brother and a few friends worked there. (At one point my brother was the product manager for Yahoo Messenger) To a tee all of them got very frustrated with the corporate situation after Yahoo grew up and eventually left. I still get flak [...]

I think the honeymoon phase for our official Agile projects is over with. The signs are:

On our first agile project the team got two facing rows of cubicles and a large team meeting room setup just for them.
On the second pilot the team got mostly moved into the same general wing of one building, [...]

I came across a post by Dave Hoover explaining a technique he called Ping Pong Programming.

Developer A writes a new test and gets a red bar.
Developer B implements the code to get to a green bar.
Developer B writes the next test.
Developer A implements it.

And of course you’re allowed to refactor where ever reasonable. [...]