Adopting Agile as the Default Methodology

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), [...]

Forced Context Switching

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 [...]

Websphere In A Box, With a Fox

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 [...]

Developing With Mocks When Development is Down

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. [...]

Code Based Job Description

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 [...]