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Big Architecture Up Front - A Case of Premature Scalaculation?
Taking a look at the reaction in the blogosphere to the idea of "premature scalaculation". The question is - when designing your application, how much time should you spend on building out for scalability?
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An Agile PM Walks a Mile in a Customer's Shoes
Last year Ternary COO Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to meet deadlines through creative solutions, instead of simply cutting scope.
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Religion driven industry? Buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection
James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issue”. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project.
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Opinion: Do Agile Development Practices Always Help?
Are our efforts in Agile development really helping the organizations we work for? What does it mean to ‘help’ our organization anyway? That depends on our organization's goals – if what we are doing moves our organization towards its goals, then the answer is “yes”, otherwise the answer is “absolutely not”, we may even be inadvertently hurting the organization.
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Software Development Insurance
The motion picture industry insures completion of their motion pictures via a performance bond, where an insurance company guarantees satisfactory completion of a project by a contractor. Laurent Bossavit ruminated on what it would take to do the same for software project.
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Failure to Learn Stifles Productivity
Amr Elssamadisy and Deborah Hartmann have written an article asking us to consider that there may be one common attribute to all software development projects that, if focused upon and improved, can make productivity soar.
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Has Agile Crossed the Chasm?
Carrying on from last year's survey, Scott Ambler published the 2007 Agile Adoption survey this month. InfoQ provides some analysis of his findings and asks readers how they would approach getting a single view of Agile trends from across the community.
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Code reuse highly overrated?
Dennis Forbes bucks the conventional wisdom that has caused the industry to trend toward architectures focused on asset reuse, asserting that code reuse is highly overrated and rarely pans out as advertised.
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Working with Mingle
InfoQ had some time with Mingle project engineer Jay Wallace, to use ThoughtWorks' much anticipated Mingle software and demonstrate to us how it differentiates itself from other products by being a truly agile project management tool.
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Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Agile compatibility
Design in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) world involves working with the user to understand the problem and come up with a user interface – typically on paper - of the entire system before turning it over, in Big Design Upfront (BDUF) manner, to the rest of the development team to build. So how can Robert Biddle claim that HCI has home-grown practices that are very similar to those of Agile?
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Does Cost Accounting Cause Crappy Code?
Cost accounting , the standard accounting approach to analyzing the monetary value of a project, treats all parts of a project independently and encourages local optimization. Local optimization of costs means that you focus on task completion time. A focus on minimizing task completion time means that you don't have time for refactoring and other niceties - they are too expensive.
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What can Math and Psychology teach us about Agile?
With Agile, we avoid early commitments to gain flexibility later. APLN members Chris Matts and Olav Maassen have noted a connection here with the math behind financial options. Their article introduces "Real Options," applying both psychology and financial math to our thinking about Agile practices. They propose it will help us refine our agile practices and take agile in new directions.
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Accurate Estimates - the ultimate oxymoron?
Amit Rathore questions the value of real time task based estimates in the planning and execution of software projects, taking a lean stance on what they bring to the software delivery party.
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InfoQ Interview: David Hussman on Coaching Agile Adoption
Agile coach and practitioner David Hussman talked to InfoQ about his approach to helping teams and organizations adopting Agile, including his ideas about customizing it without compromising the common denominators required to make Agile really work. He talked about "story tests", addressing manager fears as their team self-organizes, and building a vibrant development community.
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Reminder: You are Not Your User
David S. Platt presented a keynote called "Why Software Sucks" at SD West recently, illustrating something we should already know: designing for ourselves is risky business. "Unless you're writing programs for a bunch of burned out computer geeks, your user isn't you."