Musings of a Software Development Manager

Having been officially adopting Agile from the top down approach for about 8 months now I was really surprised by a recent project kickoff meeting. I just assumed that we’d be using our official Agile methodology on this high profile project. Some assumptions I made were: The two product owners, business analyst, project manager (ScrumMaster), [...]

Sometimes, despite your best efforts you get forced to stretch a developer across more than one project. Johanna Rothman posted on this recently arguing that many managers just don’t get the difficulties of asking their people to multi-task. Sometime, I don’t really get a choice. I’m very familiar with the pains of context switching since [...]

Sometimes technical folks selling enterprise software can be so very honest. We had an IBM architect, of which they have many, mention in a presentation on SOA admit: “This is not easy stuff to implement. You got a Ferrari but it came in boxes and pieces.” I don’t know if we got a Ferrari. Considering [...]

One unexpected bonus of implementing TDD in our shop came up this week. Mocks can be a development tool as well. The situation is pretty simple, our legacy development environment is down. Since it is our main data source on the project in the past this would have left the team dead in the water. [...]

You don’t come across a developer job posting quite this creative all that often (courtesy Cory Foy via the XP mailing list). I love the idea of doing a code based job posting, but I’m not sure you could swing it by your average Fortune 500 HR department. My personal favorite statement: assertTrue(candidate.practiceTDD()); And my [...]

Since as soon as you add login to a site your functional tests are going to require a login, there is of course an easy fix documented here. You just add a login method to your test_helper.rb file. Then you call it in your setup method: def setup @controller = LoginController.new @request = ActionController::TestRequest.new @response [...]

Dave Astels argues pretty strongly that though Test Driven Development is catching on, many people could still be practicing it better. One issue is the idea of one-to-one production classes to test classes: “A lot of people have a mantra. We’ll have ClassX and ClassXTest.” – Dave Astels His point is well taken, and honestly [...]

As a manager I had a proud moment on Friday at a regular standup meeting. Everyone went around the room as usual and since it’s nearing the end of the sprint, the testing members pressed on when the code would be ready in QA to start formal testing. The developer responded: “We’ll be done Wednesday, [...]

Stumbled my way through leading a Sprint review for our Intranet Portal project. I felt a bit unprepared as I hadn’t even bothered to make nice slides of the 14 product backlog items we completed. (I just read off the 3×5 index cards I pulled off our Sprint board that morning) To top it off [...]

Websphere Portal Server is our current technology boat anchor. We’re stuck on Websphere Portal Server 5.1 until there’s a new release. Today we got the real picture on the release schedule from an IBM Portal Architect: Portal Server 6.0 late summer Portal Server 6.0.1.x maybe November 2006 (the stable one he recommended waiting for) Portal [...]