Agile

While thinking about Walking In Space, I was motivated by how teams worked and communicated. But I am a developer and in the back of every developers mind is the thought “If only I could just do it all myself, it would be so much easier”. At first blush, this is an impractical and unlikely hypothesis. Most useful and comprehensive solutions are the result of teams, not individuals. But after turning it over a bit, I thought that it might be a good place to start. ...

I have been playing with a simple way to visualise progress and efficiency when we are creating solutions. I think could be useful, tell me what you think. When I came up with this method, I was a little frustrated. My team was doing a lot of work but making only modest progress. We hadn’t spent enough time on prototyping so our stack was slowing us down. We were using discovery to figure out how features would look but this meant a lot of re-work. ...

Debugging is Evil Debugging is evil. Debugging is not coding. Coding is a creative flow. Coding is bringing together objects and methods and classes to represent and solve problems for your users. Coding adds value, solving problems for your users is useful. Debugging is not coding. Debugging is an analytical process. Debugging adds no value in and of itself. The very best you can do with debugging is to get it over quickly so you can realise the value that you already added when you were coding. ...

Through using and explaining BDD, I have become convinced that there are 3 main facets to the BDD approach. Understanding the incremental benefit and cost of these facets is key to guiding you on your BDD journey. 1) A common vocabulary for describing behaviours Using the ‘Given, When, Then’ pro-forma for describing behaviour is the first, easiest to introduce and IMO, most important aspect of the BDD approach. It is easy to get across to people without resistance because it is so simple, almost trivial. ...

I was writing out some conditions of satisfaction today and was about to write one about code modularisation. Some rubbish like As a developer, I want to be able to independently release my code so that I can fulfill my obligations….. As an Agilist, the ‘As a developer’ bit immediately rang an alarm bell, so I decided to recast this with the dicipline of thinking about real users.. do they care. ...