Seven Strategies for Pair Programming
Of all the agile developer practices I teach, pair programming gets the most resistance from management. Managers often ask me how putting two developers on the same task can possible be more efficient than having them work independently on different tasks…but it most definitely is. Well, you may not find a huge increase in the …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Doing Emergent Design
Emergent design is an advanced technique, drawing on several agile practices. When done correctly, it can be a highly efficient way of building quality software but it is not a beginner technique, it requires a deep understanding in many areas. Here are seven strategies to help you master emergent design: 1. Understand object-oriented design Just …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Agile Infrastructure
The first step in achieving agility and technical excellence is to set up an infrastructure to support it. The infrastructure we will discuss here, an automated build server, is one of the most important aspects of agility because we can only consider a story as “done” when it is fully integrated into the build. Here …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies to Foster Hyper-Performing Teams
Hyper-performing teams do exist. I know teams that are an order of magnitude more productive than average teams. Achieving hyper-performance is possible if everyone on the team has the skills and a burning passion to do their best. Here are seven tips that can help your team become high performing, if not hyper-performing: 1. Know …
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Read MoreSeven Strategies for Improving Your Scrum Process
Scrum is a minimal framework for providing feedback so we can constantly improve our development process yet many teams use Scrum prescriptively without using the feedback that Scrum makes available for ongoing improvement. Here are seven strategies for using Scrum to improve your development process. 1. Use retrospectives Scrum offers many subtle feedback loops to …
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Read MoreScrum for Science
I’ve been fortunate to work with clients whose business requires a large amount of scientific research. One client is so committed to Scrum that they brought their researchers to my Scrum Developer Certification training and for the first time I seriously looked at how to use the practices of Scrum and XP to do scientific …
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Read MoreWhat Do You Hate About Developing Software?
I have asked the question “What don’t you like about developing software” to thousands of developer and I often hear similar answers. The list is a bit longer than the list of what we love about developing software, discussed in my last post, but don’t infer that it outweighs what we love about it. I …
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Read MoreWhat Do You Love about Developing Software?
I have asked this question to thousands of developers in my classes and I always hear very similar answers: “I love creating something new that has never been done before.” “I love giving people tools to help them do their work more efficiently.” “I love solving problems.” “I love learning about new domains.” “I love …
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Read MoreMy Favorite App
In honor of the New iPad, I thought I’d blog this time about something other than software development and share with you my favorite app. I believe Apple will continue to own the tablet market not because of their stunning hardware or great ad campaigns. They know what Microsoft knew and IBM didn’t twenty years …
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Read MoreAvoid the Legacy Trap
Some of my clients put their best software developers on a project to build a system and then afterwards they put new hires on to maintain and extend it. Often the intention behind the original design is not clear to the people who have inherited the system and so they tend to make changes that …
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Read MoreTechniques of Design Has Become To Be Agile
Realizing that mastering Agile software development is more than just learning techniques, I am rebranding and changing the name of my company to (drum roll, please)… To Be Agile This new name (and website) reflects a new commitment to helping our community, not just do the Agile practices, but to be Agile with everything we …
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Read MoreConnections
I remember a poster at my college that said “All great minds don’t think alike but they do make connections.” I think this is especially true in software development where we are all largely self-taught. When I ask my students what the most valuable thing they got from my training was, I get a lot …
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Read MoreBecome a Better Problem-Solver
Interestingly enough, I do not find many sources discussing problem-solving skills for software development. Most books are concerned with the mechanics of a language or framework and almost every software design book I read teaches a procedure rather than to pay attention to the clues in the problem itself. Certainly, universities do not teach these …
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Read MoreSolutions Thinking
How we think about a problem has a direct impact on the solutions that are available to us. What is or isn’t possible is oftentimes a fluid thing based on what we know and also what we believe. In software, virtually anything is possible but the level of difficulty often depends on our starting assumptions. …
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Read MoreDo You Play All or Nothing?
Would you pay $10 to spin a roulette wheel with a potential payoff of a million dollars? Maybe so but you probably wouldn’t do it if you had to win 100 spins in a row, right? Risk is part of life; we have to take them but we want our risks to be calculated. Yet …
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Read MoreIntegrate Early and Often
A story, use case, or requirement is not done until it is integrated into the rest of the build system. “Well, it works on my machine,” is not a statement we want to hear on an Agile project. A story that is not integrated into the build is not complete and worth zero story points …
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Read MoreDon’t Do (Up Front) Design
I worked on many projects in my 30 year career as a software developer. I’ve worked on embedded systems, operating systems, collaboration software, downloadable applications, and enterprise applications—the whole gambit. I’ve done coding, testing, managed developers, been a ScrumMaster, Product Owner and virtually every other role on a development team. The thing I enjoy the …
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Read MoreThe Scrum Excuse
“We don’t need to do <blank>, we’re doing Scrum.” I’ve heard some beginning Scrum teams say this. They think that doing Scrum is their get-out-of-jail-free card, freeing them from doing architecture, design, documentation or even thinking about what they are doing. Compared to waterfall, Scrum is a lightweight process but it is a process and …
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Read MoreDo You Mentor?
One of the things that established professions like medicine and law have that we as software developers don’t have is some form of mandatory mentoring. For doctors it is residency, for lawyers it is internships, even carpenters need to apprentice with a master carpenter before they can become a master themselves. But in software development …
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Read MoreMaking the Right Tradeoffs
Compromises are part of life. We must make tradeoffs if we are going to ship product but we want to make the right tradeoffs and that can only happen when we have information to back our decisions. Understanding good design principles and practices help us make informed technical decisions. The principles give us guidance in …
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Read MoreThe Enemy of the Great
They say that perfection is the enemy of the great and this is very true in software development. I used to believe that there was no such thing as the perfect design but now, after years of studying design, I think in many situations there is such a thing as a perfect design. The problem …
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Read MoreYou Are Awesome (Whatever You Call Yourself)!
I teach software design at some of the largest and most well-funded companies on the planet. My classes cover concepts and practices that most developers are not aware of. I do draw on other people’s work—lots of other people—but I synthesize it in new ways and give practical examples from my own experience as a …
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