In the best session I’ve attended at Agile 2008 Joseph Pelrine talked about some of the ideas and science around self organization teams. The talk has an excellent subtitle “Hard science for soft skills”. I’ve already covered some of the presentation and exercises on InfoQ so I won’t repeat that here. Instead I will focus […]
Multiple Returns from a Single Method
A response to objections about multiple return statements in my recent post on Minimal Coding Style, covering the history and my thoughts on methods.
Minimalist Coding Style
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry. If you’ve ever invited me do some pair programming with you, you probably have a good idea what this quote is all about. I often wind up asking questions like: […]
Agile and Scrum Smells
Smells are a series of simple patterns in Scrums that describe a problem, which can then lead to potential solutions.
Minimally Agile
Recently I had a conversation with a long time friend that made me realize that in my writing and conversation I often come across as a fanatic. Oppppsssss. Time for me to hit the big red reset button. I’m opinionated and passionate but I also believe that you can do good work even if your […]
Mythbusting – Collective Code Ownership
While researching “Are there weaknesses with Collective Code Ownership?” for InfoQ, I was struck by the number of myths around Collective Code Ownership.
Test Driven Development vs “Plain Old Unit Testing”
Responding to ‘Test Driven Development considered harmful.’ The primary benefits of TTD are simplified design, cleaner APIs, decoupling, and reduced bugs.
Solve your Task Estimation problem in Scrum
I’m often asked about improving the estimates of task hours generated during planning meetings. Years of waterfall development have taught us – if we improve the estimates we will do a much better job of tracking the sprint progress. When this comes up I like to ask two questions: why estimate task size at all? […]