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.
Continue reading “Peering into the crystal ball: BDUF vs emergent design”
Steve brings up a quote that I’ve always liked: By definition, risk-takers often fail
Continue reading “Failure is necessary to succeed”
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?
Continue reading “Build servers are for more than just building”
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.”
Continue reading “Heavy or light: it’s all relative”
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?
Continue reading “Does it really matter if the build is broken?”
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.
Continue reading “Estimation Anti-Pattern”
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.
Continue reading “Moving on – reflections”
Chris Justus managed to totally miss my point. He assumes that I was advocating for crappy uncommented code. That is not the case.
Continue reading “/** no comment */”
I’ve often encountered the attitude that code or scripts should be commented to the extent that someone unfamiliar with the language being used can understand what’s going on. I most recently encountered this with a set of Ant build scripts I had developed.
Doing this would be bad.
Continue reading “How not to comment code”
Dale Emery proposes a simple test to see if a best practice really is.
Continue reading “An acid test for “Best Practices””
Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 