RSpec Revisited

I haven’t really spent a lot of time with RSpec since about the 0.5 release. I took a tutorial class with Dave Astels and got jazzed about the opportunity since they were really able to leverage Ruby to make a nice BDD framework. After using RSpec all JUnit test methods started including should. The [...]

Agile With Infrastructure Projects

Agile is really designed around software projects. Infrastructure is a different animal. With an infrastructure project some things start to break down:

You usually aren’t writing much code, maybe some database install scripts so no unit tests. Often there’s no continuous integration to speak of. Configuration tasks on new software are often difficult to estimate. [...]

Continuous Integration and Enterprise Architecture Governance

Continuous Integration can be a great place to do governance. With good reason developers get the shakes when someone mentions we need more governance. Past history has taught them governance often means someone above them says no.

Continuous integration allows you to inject good development practices and ensure some governance without having to always be [...]

Annual Goals with the Dead Man’s Rule

Ran across a wonderful rule when putting together your annual goals.

“A goal that a dead man can meeting is pretty useless.”

- (Comment on Manager Tools)

Some potential dead man’s goals:

Improve automation on projects.

All I need to meet this goal is a single developer with an ounce of effort to create [...]

Mainstream Agile with XP?

I hadn’t realized the Head First series now has a book on software development. Curious, I took a glance at the table of contents. Topics include:

TDD User Stories Burn Down Charts Continuous Integration Test Coverage

Agile and XP practices are starting to be assumed. Maybe Ambler and others are right that Agile has [...]