Category: Agile Development

The importance of your user interface metaphor.

Christ Stevenson bitched about the Gnome calculator Apparently, if you enter the equation ‘2*2+2*2’, it gives an answer of 12.
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Empirical vs determinstic methodologies: a cooking analogy

A deterministic methodology is one where you lay out all the steps, then following them religiously. An empirical methodology is one where you layout guidelines, and expect people to adapt as circumstances suit.
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Build servers are for more than just building

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?
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Heavy or light: it’s all relative

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 of view. In the immortal words of Ben Kenobi, “many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.”
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Expressing Intent vs Duplication

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague this afternoon. It centred around what was more important: expressing intent (which I was advocating) vs. removing duplication.
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Does it really matter if the build is broken?

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?

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Estimation Anti-Pattern

Name: Precision Estimation

AntiPattern Problem

Developers continually get asked to provide an estimate with a high degree of accuracy. They are expected to spend a fixed period of time to produce the estimate.

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Moving on – reflections

I’m leaving Suncorp in January, after about 3 years there. I’m taking up a position at wotif.com where I will be joining a small team that drives their website.
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Interesting comment on “talent”

The New Yorker has an article on talent management in modern corporations It looks into how companies manage talent to improve performance. Quite a good read.

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