Sorry this one is a bit overdue – it should’ve appeared last Thursday (Oct 25).
Welcome to the Carnival of the Agilists a carnival whose editorship rotates among four editors (Pete Behrens, Kevin Rutherford, John Brothers and myself).
James Shore hits a theme that’s been bothering me a bit lately (see Don’t call overridable methods in constructors) : “It’s the Software, Stupid!“. Scott Hanselman (channeling Patrick Cauldwell) says: “If your method can’t do what it’s name promises it can, throw“. Its a simple reminder – if you can’t meet the contract implied by your name throw an exception. Finally Ed Gibbs gives us the ultimate Agile Metric: Crap4J (a real Eclipse plugin, now supports other IDEs). Simply put it measures complexity (bad) vs test coverage (good) and gives your code a resulting crap rating. Very little code I’ve seen looks good when viewed through this lens.
Working remotely has been on my mind a lot lately and so it was it fitting that I came across Chris Sell’s: Working Remotely for Microsoft: Can You Communicate Effectively From Home? Simon Baker reminds us that colocation is always better.
Leadership has been a hot topic on the Agile mailing lists in the past few weeks. Joe Little weighs in with two posts: Knowing where to go and Leadership: Getting us there. Related to leadership Mishkin Berteig brings us Truthfulness in Agile.
In A Case for Small Teams and Longer Development Cycles Clinton Keith considers a better way for the gaming industry to create great games.
Jon Torresdal asks Planning Poker – Why does it work? Jon examines what makes planning poker tick. Jeff Atwood says Let’s Play Planning Poker! and urges us to use historical data to feedback on the accuracy of his estimates. I’m not at all sure that it’s worth the additional effort, since I think that the team will learn to commit to less estimated effort over a few iterations of failing to meet their commitment. However it’s well worth a read.
On the subject of stories Simon Baker suggests that we focus on thin vertical slices and Chris Sterling does us all a favor in providing definitions for: Research, Spikes, Tracer Bullets, Oh My!.
Chris goes on to Building a Definition of Done – remedying a situation – the varying definition of done – that we’ve all seen a few times.
Finally Peter’s mommy mentions The very best question asked in an agile team. Read it smile and give the “guy from the Services team” an appreciation.