Ok so I’m about a month behind. Over on Coding Horror Jeff Atwood asked “I can’t help wondering if pair programming is nothing more than code review on steroids”. In a word ‘No’. Code Reviews …(and I’ve done many) are static. One or more people study the code often long after it was written and […]
Notes from a Tool User
Best Agile Books 2007 Development/Code Related
The third and final my Best Agile Books the 2007 Edition series. (Part II was Background Material). There will be even fewer notes than there were in yesterday’s. It really has been a long week. Development/Code Related Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers – Do you have legacy code? Does your code include […]
Best Agile Books 2007 the Background Material
This is the second part of my Best Agile Books in 2007 Edition. This post will considerably lighter on notes than its predecessor because I’m tired and under the weather. Background Books Corporate Culture Survival Guide by Edgar H. Schein – an insightful book that looks at the corporate culture and how it forms. In […]
Best Agile Books the 2007 Edition
Last year in response to some questions at a CSM course I wrote a post: “Top 8 Agile Books: Beyond the Basics“. This past week I was help out at a CSM course when the topic came up again. This time I’ve a much longer list of books. Top Three – I wouldn’t start an […]
Transparency Builds Trust
I hadn’t really thought Transparency as a Lesson until I got to the end of the week and still haven’t written about the Product Owner. It’s better to admit the failure – I have no posting ready, than to either ignore the problem or dash off a poor quality post. Scrum forces transparency on us in […]
Good Agendas Make Great Meetings
Think the standard Scrum agendas will help you get value out of the meetings? There is a lot more you can do with agendas to improve Reviews and Retrospectives.
Working at a Distance is Hard
Working at a distance is hard. There is a reason all the Agile methodologies recommend co-location. You miss: A sense of presence Hallway conversations Rich shared environment (whiteboards, flipcharts, …) Personal cues – you can’t tell when someone is focused or would welcome interruption. It’s very difficult to build trust. You don’t share the same […]
Protected variables cause subtle bugs – don’t use them
This has been said before: Protected variables are evil (blog post gone). But apparently as I’ve been doing some debugging into the Eclipse code I’m reminded it needs saying again. Let’s suppose we write a base class public class SimpleBase { protected Object value = new Integer(10); public printValue() { system.out.println(value.toString()); […]