Software is too expensive to build cheaply…

Software development is not a profession. It will never be a profession while people like the guy who wrote this lovely piece continue to get paid to develop software.
The reason, of course, is that professions have the requirement that professionals be competent.
Fortunately, I’m happy being a software craftsman

Ahhh… that’s the first production release of my latest project at work out the door today. I can’t talk too much about specifics, but it’s not a big secret that Wotif is enabling various B2B aspects of our web site, mainly with the registered hotels. Today saw the first big step in that direction. :) [...]

A bloody excellent IT Conversation podcast by Jason Fried of 37signals, taken from O’Reilly ETech 2005.
Jason covers a lot of issues that are at the heart of Agile Development, particularly when it comes to keeping your codebase lean-and-mean, and the YAGNI principle.
Seriously: everyone should listen to this.

From Ron Jeffries, courtesty of the XP Mailing list:
“YAGNI is about coding, not about thinking”

A very interesting article, originally published in 1992, on Code as Design Yet more proof that there isn’t anything new about Agile (and that’s it’s best part! ;)

There’s always a lot of debate in the various agile groups about what BDUF is, why you should avoid it, when you should avoid it, and why is it bad (or good) for you. I just thought I’d outline my own opinions here.

Steve brings up a quote that I’ve always liked: By definition, risk-takers often fail

Using a build server (such as CruiseControl doesn’t mean developers shouldn’t run local builds (even though broken builds aren’t really as serious as a lot of people make them out to be). So this raises the question: if developers run their build locally, what’s the build server for?

On the XP mailing list a discussion has been going on recently on how a student at a presentation commented that XP seemed to be fairly heavy. Now, I know that “heavy” and “light” are rather passé terms for describing methodologies these days, but you know, the student was right – for a certain point [...]

Andy Marks recently posted a dissection of various categories of build failures. In general, I agree that there are definitely different severities of build failures. The question is: is there a time when a build failure is not important?