Archive for category Software Development

This is not a manifesto: Valuing Throughput over Utilisation

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 [...]

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Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria

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 [...]

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Sushi, Hibachi and Other Ways of Serving Software Delicacies

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 [...]

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To hack, or not to hack

Recently, Engadget reported that Nokia had decided to abandon MeeGo in favour of Windows Mobile. What was interesting is the reported process used to make this decision: Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for [...]

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Old Favourite – More Sharks and Delaying Critical Mass

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 [...]

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Old Favourite – Sharks, Debts, Critical Mass and other reasons to Sustain Quality

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 [...]

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Old Favourite – Developer Race-Tech: Continuous Testing

The original version of this article appeared on my old blog on 28th April 2010. This version has had some edits… Gearboxes in competitive motor racing are designed to shift as fast as possible. A competitive race-car has computer controlled, hydraulically activated gear shifts that change gears up or down faster than you can blink [...]

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What do special forces teams have in common with agile teams?

In 2008, I wrote an article for Better Software Magazine… “Few would think that Special Forces tactics bear any relation to software project teams. But Antony Marcano draws a surprising parallel between the dynamics of modern Special Forces “room-clearing” methods and the dynamics of modern software development teams.” My thinking has moved on slightly since [...]

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Cucumber – with step-free access

A while back I wrote about writing feature specs (acceptance tests) at the right level of abstraction. I explained how we want to pitch our scenarios at the “task” level… Goal: What we’re trying to achieve which has one or more… Tasks: The high-level work-item that we complete to fulfil the goal, each having one [...]

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Old Favourite: Feature Injection User Stories on a Business Value Theme

This originally appeared on my old blog in May 2010 Feature Injection, an approach to Agile Business Analysis created by Chris Matts, is a much misunderstood thing –. It is a way of combining several techniques to understand just enough of a business problem to start expressing solutions to it. It provides specific techniques to [...]

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