Posts Tagged agile
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A bit of UCD for BDD & ATDD: Goals -> Tasks -> Actions
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business Analysis, Software Development, Software Testing on March 6, 2011
There’s something wrong with many behaviour specs (or acceptance tests). It’s been this way for some time. I’ve written about this once or twice before, referencing this post by Kevin Lawrence from 2007. So, first things first, I want to take this opportunity to update the terminology I use… Goals -> Tasks -> Actions A [...]
Old Favourite: Taking Repetition To Task
Posted by AntonyMarcano in BDD/ATDD, Business Analysis, Old Favourites, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on December 13, 2010
This originally appeared on my old blog on 16th March 2010… Others have talked about the virtues of stories as vertical slices of a problem (end-to-end capabilities) rather than horizontal slices (system layers or components). So, if we slice the problem with user stories, how do we slice the user-stories themselves? If, as I sometimes [...]
My Tack on Effective Change
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business, People, Project Management on November 11, 2010
One of the key characteristics of how we coach our clients’ teams is that we help them start from where they are and introduce small, frequent changes that help them progressively achieve their goals. Each incremental change is driven by a problem the teams recognise they are facing. We then help to find a small change [...]
Being a youDevise Developer – Week 1
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Uncategorized on July 18, 2010
In my previous post, I gave the background to me spending the next month or two as a developer on a youDevise product. I’ve just completed my first ‘official’ week working with them. It was one of, if not, the smoothest of inductions I’ve ever experienced. I arrived and was shown a desk to work [...]
Antony Marcano is a consultant in software craftsmanship, effective software processes, software quality and software testing. He has over fifteen years experience with... 