Musings of a Software Development Manager

A core part of Scrum and many other Agile methodologies is ‘inspect and adapt.’ Retrospectives are a key practice in reviewing the last iteration. You toss up on stickies or a white board the ‘What Went Well’ and ‘What To Look Into.’ Diana Larsen held a session at the end of Agile Open California on [...]

A sign of team self-management success is when the Scrum Master is out or busy and someone just fills in. I’ve known one of our Scrum projects was moving along pretty well, but our organization still has a tendency to try to have another PM fill in at the daily standup. In the old command [...]

A single number representing whether you’re six months worth of coding is actually not crap. Not code coverage, Checkstyle warnings or defects per thousand lines of code but a single score. Alberto Savio of Agitar Software presented on his new Crap4J tool at an Agile Open California session this week. Crap4J produces a single number [...]

Assumption was soon after installing the developer tools for Mac OS X 1.5 Leopard I’d have a brand new spanking copy of Java 1.6 on my MacBook Pro. $ java -version java version “1.5.0_13″ Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_13-b05-237) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_13-119, mixed mode, sharing) OK, surely it’s just [...]

Dave Nicholette argued recently that Enterprise Architecture and Agile are not compatible partners: The mission, scope, tools, mentality, culture, and personality types of enterprise architects and agilists are so radically different that (in my view) they call for separate administrative subdivisions in the enterprise. Not only is the nature of their work different, but the [...]