Microreleases

In my pet project Bumblebee, I started out planning releases in a traditional agile way; small batches of features I wanted. I was spending a lot of time moving features in and out of releases, even features that I still haven’t implemented. I also had some very long release cycles, with a maximum of some 4 months where I didn’t release anything, just because I wanted to finish the batch! All of this because of… yeah, why did I ever do that? I was mesmerized by “The Scrum” having me planning and committing to these batches of work that I rarely completed and changed all of the time. How wasteful!

User-Guide-Driven Development

In my work with Bumblebee I use an approach I call “User-Guide-Driven Development”, or UGDD for short. The mechanics of UGDD is similar to that of Test-Driven Development (TDD), but before I write the test for a feature, I write a snippet of the user guide describing the feature I am about to implement.

Programmer as tester, project manager and usability expert?

During the last couple of years programmers have been doing more and more testing thanks to the TDD-”paradigm”, and we have faced problems that testers have been facing for many years, e.g. “What are the boundary values?”, “Do I cover all special cases?” and so on. Programmers have become “30% testers”.

Energized work

One of the members on my team is having his son acclimatizing at daycare, and he was amazed with how the kids were playing around together, climbing and crawling, and how they we’re constantly experiencing, thinking and learning. He said “They seem to have so much fun and learn so much, why don’t we do that as adults?”.

Yeah, why don’t we?

Refactor towards abstraction

I have been in discussions about how far to refactor a lot of times. “Until duplication is removed”, is a common position, and sure, that is fine.

Agile is relative and dynamic

Some people say things like “I wonder what will be the next hype after Agile?”.

I my opinion this illustrates a misconception about agile, that agile is static and absolute. This is simply not the case.

Commercialism and politics

I was in a very interesting session at Agile2008, held by Rachel Davies and Angela Martin. The name of the session was “Mr Agile goes to Washington – politics in agile projects”. The session generated a lot of insight around positioning and face-saving, good and bad politics, and the fact that as soon as there is more than one person involved, there is politics.

Bug-, feature- and technical debt

I our project we’ve been fixing a lot of old bugs lately, and one would think that some of our debt should decrease.

Refactoring organizations – refactoring code

Today I was struck by the similarities between rewriting code (as opposed to refactoring it) and how many companies reorganize.

When I was a young programmer and the code I had written was a mess I thought that if I just got the chance to rewrite everything it would then work better. Out with the old, and start on a blank sheet.