Wednesday, November 30, 2005
TDD haiku
Posted by Simon Baker
I didn't make the haiku session at XPDAY5, but I thought I'd try it on test-driven development:
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Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Before Iteration Zero
Posted by Simon Baker
This session was presented by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. It's purpose was to allow all project stakeholders to explore what needs to be done before agile development can commence. The session synopsis posed a number of thought provoking questions:
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I'm not a bottleneck! I'm a free man!
Posted by Simon Baker
This session was presented by Pascal Van Cauwenberge Rob Westgeest and introduced the Theory of Constraints.
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Comments: 1
Story Telling with FIT
Posted by Simon Baker
This session was presented by Steve Freeman and Mike Hill. Using FIT is a great way to produce automated acceptance tests, but the underlying message of the session was: The act of designing and writing the FIT documents can be an effective means of communicating with the customer. This can help us understand the details of a user story and identify suitable acceptance criteria, which tell us when we're done. The role playing between Steve [the techie] and Mike [the busy customer] was a giggle and demonstrated how well this communication mechanism can work.
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Comments: 1
Monday, November 28, 2005
Dead fish and cargo overboard
Posted by Simon Baker
I think the most memorable phrases that came out of XPDay will be those used by Tim Lister in his keynote speech. First, dead fish of failure describes the festering smell those projects have which are setup to fail from the beginning. Second, imagine your project is a cruise liner or cargo freighter. When it set sail it contained lots of cargo or user stories. As the cruise progresses the act of descoping user stories from a sprint or iteration is like throwing cargo overboard. I wonder how many projects have reached their destination with empty holds?
Friday, November 25, 2005
More Scrum podcasts
Posted by Simon Baker
The AgileGuys discuss Scrum Master certification
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Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Encourage collaboration by writing just the story name on the card
Posted by Simon Baker
I read Brian Marick's blog post about Story card style and liked Rachel Davies' comment about limiting the text on a story card to a story name. We have been writing notes on the story cards and they've become messy. There's always room to improve communication and it sounds like this will be a simple but effective way to encourage conversation to continue during the iteration.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Repaying technical debt
Posted by Simon Baker
Circumstances often place developers in a situation where they face the decision: Do I write a cheap and nasty solution in order to move forward now? Or do I take more time to solve the problem properly and risk delivering less business value by the end of the sprint? In this situation, an agile developer should do the right thing.
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Sunday, November 20, 2005
How not to do it: Test-Driven Development, Microsoft-style
Posted by Simon Baker
In their Guidelines for Test-Driven Development, Microsoft says:
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Comments: 4
