Knowledge-work, is serendipity-work
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business on July 26, 2012
Serendipity is core to the success of modern companies. While some may not have articulated their insights as facilitating serendipity, it was certainly what they were thinking, even if they didn’t realise it. Enabling Serendipity For example, Google’s 20% time, where employees can spend 20% of their time working on anything they like, has resulted [...]
This is not a manifesto: Valuing Throughput over Utilisation
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Lean, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on February 11, 2012
In a previous article, This is not a manifesto, I expressed the values I hold as a software development team member. Today, I’m going to talk about the first of these values. Before I do, I’d like to say what I mean by “software development team”. I mean a cross-discipline team with the combined skills [...]
This is not a manifesto
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Lean, People on February 4, 2012
Recently, I had cause to ponder the values I hold as a member of a software development team. Values that, alongside other values I hold, drive my choices and behaviours. They sit behind the things I do and how I do them. They underly my thinking when considering how we can improve as a team [...]
Mission Critical Agility at NASA
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Uncategorized on November 10, 2011
Yesterday at Better Software and Agile Development Practices East in Orlando, I enjoyed a great keynote talk from Dr Jeff Norris, of Nasa, on Mission Critical Agility. Among the things talked about was the decision to use a lunar orbit rendezvous method, rather than the direct ascent method. One opportunity that was missed during the [...]
Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business Analysis, Software Development, Software Testing, Uncategorized on October 2, 2011
Acceptance Criteria, Scenarios, Acceptance Tests are, in my experience, often a source of confusion. Such confusion results in questions like the one asked of Rachel Davies recently, i.e. “When to write story tests” (sometimes also known as “Acceptance Tests” or in BDD parlance “Scenarios”). In her answer, Rachel highlighted that: “…acceptance criteria and example scenarios [...]
Sushi, Hibachi and Other Ways of Serving Software Delicacies
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business, People, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on July 1, 2011
Let’s say you own a restaurant. Quite a large restaurant. You’ve hired a manager to run the place for you because you are about to take the fruits of your success and invest in opening three more around the country. You leave the manager with a budget to make any improvements he sees fit. After [...]
Old Favourite – More Sharks and Delaying Critical Mass
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business, Business Analysis, Old Favourites, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on June 7, 2011
This article originally featured on my old blog on 19th January 2010. In a previous post I talked about Critical Mass of software. I showed how an ever-increasing cost of change resulted in it becoming more economical to completely rewrite the system than to enhance and maintain the original. I explained how this could be [...]
Old Favourite – Sharks, Debts, Critical Mass and other reasons to Sustain Quality
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business, Business Analysis, Old Favourites, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on June 7, 2011
This article originally featured on my old blog on 18th January 2010. A while back I tweeted about critical mass of software: Critical Mass of Code – past which the changeability of the code is infeasible, requiring that it be completely rewritten. An elaboration of this might be: Critical Mass of Software: the state of [...]
About
Antony Marcano is a consultant in software craftsmanship, effective software processes, software quality and software testing. He has over fifteen years experience with... (read more)
