Agile

The goal of software delivery is to minimize the lead time to business impact. Everything else is detail.

A curious phenomenon #

At the end of 2009 I left the world of agile delivery and consulting to join a small team in a trading firm. I was member number three. The team grew to five in the next few weeks. This team was the most insanely effective delivery machine I’ve ever been a part of. A handful of programmers sitting in amongst a handful of traders, producing state-of-the-art trading systems—with all the integration pain (back office, risk management, connecting to electronic exchanges) that involves—in weeks. Not months, weeks. This is, of course, impossible.

I’ve just come back from the excellent NDC 2012 event in Oslo, where they published my article about opportunity cost in The Developer magazine ahead of the conference.

I’ve noticed a number of people recently declaring that BDD really is just TDD, such as Robert Martin on Twitter and Ron Jeffries on the XP list. I can understand where this mindset comes from and I’d like to offer my perspective.

It’s November, and it seems I haven’t posted anything here since January. Partly that’s because I have a Proper Job™ these days, which means I spend a lot less time writing and blogging. Partly I’ve rediscovered the joy of actually programming, which means I get to spend most of my time hacking on code.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect that kind of interest in my last post. In the past I’ve tended to have a few hundred people reading my infrequent mumblings. In the last few days nearly 20,000 people have popped by according to my site statistics, leaving nearly 150 comments. Crikey!

TL;DR #

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.

I currently have a backlog of about 15 blog articles I am failing to finish. The most embarrassingly laggy one dates from around the end of 2007. Now I know I’m a slacker.

However, others have been far more industrious than me.