This is a selection of featured articles, from the blog archive and from various publications over the years. We hope you enjoy them.
Someone asked me recently for advice about consulting into multiple teams, in particular about how to make the most effective use of a number of short sessions. He will be spending two hours with each team in each visit. This will be an ongoing relationship, with a series of visits made up of these two hour coaching sessions.
Some software teams get stuck because their business users don’t realize they need to make time to take delivery of features they’ve requested. Over time their User Acceptance Testing backlog increases to the point where the team’s throughput virtually stalls.
Experienced delivery folks can have surprisingly good instincts for macro-level estimation, as long as we are careful to manage blind spots and cognitive biases. This can be an important tool in early project investment discussions, and can remove roadblocks where people are uncomfortable or unwilling to provide estimates.
Watch the magician. Watch how he drops a coin into his hand, closes his hand, shows you the closed hand, opens it with a flourish, and the coin is gone! He smiles. You look to his other hand. He turns it over and opens it with the same flourish. Not there either! Then he takes your hand, closes it into a fist, opens it and there is the coin!
The brittleness of tests or specs is a recurring topic in BDD (or acceptance test-driven development, specification-by-example, or whatever you choose to call the thing where you write acceptance criteria, automate them and then make the application match). This is a tricky area, and there are probably as many styles of defining and grouping acceptance criteria as there are teams automating them.
The aspect I want to focus on in this article is domain language, because there’s a failure mode I encounter surprisingly often, which seems to have a common root cause.
Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines.
Last year I wrote about how we are doing planning all wrong, or rather, how we seem to focus on the wrong things when we do planning. We obsess about stories and story points and estimation, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do.
Once upon a time there was a lady in a taxi. It took such a long time for the lady to get to her destination in the taxi that she went to the town hall and told the man from the council. The man from the council wanted to figure out why the taxi journey was so slow, so he placed cameras at all the traffic lights in the town to measure how many cars went past, and how quickly. The traffic light cameras would click every time a car went past the lights.
Business people want estimates. They want to know how much it’s going to cost them to get a solution, and they want to know how likely it is to come in on time and on budget. And of course quality is not negotiable.
During the past few years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a mainstream approach for designing and developing enterprise software. As with most new technologies, the adoption of SOA has been led by software vendors and shaped by their particular tools and sales targets. Naturally it is in the vendors’ interest to emphasize the complexity of SOA and then provide a timely and profitable solution. This leads many systems architects into a technology-centric view of SOA, when, in fact, the most important criteria for a service-oriented architect—before tackling the technology—should be a keen understanding of the business.