Tools As Agile Catalyst

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 [...]

TDD Class Part Duex

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 code in [...]

Java 1.5 Is Very Far Away

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 Developer. Turns out RAD 6.0 [...]

A Meeting Developers Don’t Hate

“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 [...]

Honest Estimating On First Sprint

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 down into [...]