Note: I split this post into two to make it more digestible. For background and context, see my post Shiny things. TL; DR Background and definition The Magpie is misunderstood and provides a good model for learning The V model of learning (contrasted to the model of T-shaped people) attempts to maximise intersection points in knowledge to enable …
I’m an avid believer in testing - TDD helps drive design, and having a test suite available to verify behaviour while maintaining an application is worth a million bucks. Even the most complete unit test suite still doesn’t guarantee that the integration between different components is correct, nor does it test the value a system …
As developers, we are good at breaking up components into sub-components - sometimes excessively so. When confronted with a larger than average chunk of work, we make a choice: either consider the work as indivisible to be delivered in its entirety, or break it up smaller pieces. Most of us already experience a sense of foreboding when confronted …
I’ve had some interesting discussions on the management of work through user stories. A lot of teams, those starting to use agile techniques, seem to have some uncertainty around common topics: The theory behind story points and why they are preferred over estimations in hours Why story points and velocity are self-correcting measures The …
In a discussion with a former colleague of mine on the organization of components and on system boundaries, we focused on the complexity inherent to software building. It hit me that we can learn from physics here. The law The first law of thermodynamics states that
Lean Software Development : An Agile Toolkit, Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck . A great resource on how the lean principles from product manufacturing can be applied unto software development. You can find a good overview in their 2002 paper here (pdf) and the Wikipedia article on Lean .