What is the Agile Sweet Spot?

An interesting question came to us from an executive sponsor of our initiative: “What is the sweet spot for Agile?”
My initial response was unspoken; “What do you mean, ‘sweet spot’?  Agile is best for all projects!”
Then, I thought better of that response.  He was, after all, an executive sponsor.  Too much passion may be passion, [...]

No, YOU don’t get the point..

In this post, Stephan Schmidt says Martin Fowler misses the point because Scrum is not about engineering practices (see here).
Actually, Stephan, you missed Martin’s point.
Martin’s post says essentially, that Scrum is gaining a reputation as an agile process that doesn’t work.  That is happening because the people who are adopting Scrum as their process believe [...]

Yes I Can Get Some Support..

The day after my last blog post about the standards group’s seemingly knee-jerk reaction to our CI choice, the group collectively got together and decided that encouraging CI was more important than the tool being used.
They got it.  All I had to do was point it out, and after some thought, they agreed.
I feel better [...]

Can I Get Some Support Here?

I’ve been chasing my development comrades around for a year or so, convincing them that test-driven development is a good thing.  That continuous integration is a great way to show what  a great job we’re doing by being transparent – posting our success and coverage numbers for everyone to see.
All the developers I can get [...]

Donald Knuth Doesn’t Get It?

I was surprised to read excerpts from an interview that Andrew Binstock did with the pre-eminent Donald Knuth regarding aspects of software development methodologies and the state of programming generally.  The summary was provided here: http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=276&thread=229705
The actual interview is here: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
What I found interesting is that, perhaps not surprisingly, the reviewer (Frank Sommers) doing the [...]

Domain-Driven Design — Practical to Tactical

..and dare I say, Strategic?
 On the Domain-Driven Design group (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/domaindrivendesign/), Bil Simser lays out a common question:
“It’s all great to talk about repositories and aggregates and context boundaries, oh my, but the real challenge is making that connection from theory to practice. Then taking it even further (because presentation style and book samples can only [...]

A Whole New Thing..

So I’ve taken a job in sunny Southern California with a company that I originally encountered about two years ago.  I had a great time with the main folks there, doing some mentoring and coaching in the agile methods.
Joining a company is NOT the same as consulting.  There are some frustrations; I was 1 of [...]

Bill Gates is Retiring..

So the news stations are freaking out.. “Bill Gates is retiring! Oh no!!” or “Bill Gates is retiring! Oh great!! No seriously, this is good for Microsoft!”
Relax.
Bill isn’t going any where for two years.
As the illustrious/nefarious (depending on your point of view) Mr. Gates has said repeatedly (paraphrasing), ‘This industry changes over night. We aren’t [...]