Linkopedia December 2009
Published December 23rd, 2009 Under Links | Leave a Comment
Post: Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
Article: A Checklist of Questions to Consider Before Starting a Large-Scale Agile Adoption
Article: A performance benchmark method for comparing open source Java application servers
Nitrogen is an Erlang Web framework
Speed Test is a multi user test case management application
UISpec is a Behavior Driven Development framework for the iPhone
Video: Building an Automated QA Infrastructure using Open-Source Python Tools
Video: Behaviour-Driven Development
Video: Event Handling with Linq
Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.
Winter 2009 issue of Methods & Tools
Published December 21st, 2009 Under Methods & Tools | Leave a Comment
Winter 2009 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Refactoring Large Software Systems
* An Introduction to Domain Driven Design
* Agile Coaching Tips
* Are Enterprise AJAX Applications Doomed…Or Are We?
* Does Process Improvement Really Pay Off?
* SQuirreL SQL Client
60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?winter09
XP Day 2010 – Edition Suisse – Call for submission
Published December 16th, 2009 Under Conferences | Leave a Comment
Banking on the success of the first XP Day – Edition Suisse, the organizing committee has decided to go back to work and launch a call for submission for the 2010 iteration. The conference will take place on Monday, March 29th, 2010. The fundamental rules have not changed: if you want to share your experience or knowledge about agility, to debate on some new idea, or to being forth anything that can contribute to agility, we need your contribution.
Read more
Agile Project Management Insights
Published December 16th, 2009 Under Quotes | 1 Comment
I am currently reading the book “Agile Project Management” from Jim Highsmith. I will publish a review later on this blog, but in the meantime I would like to share some of the interesting quotes that I have found in the book. I am sure they will make sense to software project managers… and developers ;o)
About adding value
“When Ward asked Toyota’s American engineering and managers how much time they spend adding value (i.e., actually doing engineering work), their response averages 80%. The same question asked of engineers and managers at American automobile companies averages 20%. How can you compete with companies that are getting four times as much value-adding work from their development engineers.” (referenced from “Product Development for the Lean Enterprise”, Michael Kennedy, the Oaklea Press, 2003)
About technical knowledge
“As a software development consultant, I’ve never encountered a successful software company (although my sample size is limited) in which the team and project leaders were not technically savvy. [...] Championing technical excellence requires that the project leader, and team members in general, understand what technical excellence means – in the product, the technology, and in the skills of the people doing the work.”
About leading or managing
“Agile leaders lead teams, non-agile ones manage tasks. How many project managers spend hours detailing tasks into Microsoft Project and then spend more hours ticking off task completions? Unfortunately, many project managers like this task oriented-approach because it is concrete, definable, and completion seems finite. Leading teams, on the other hand, seems fuzzy, messy, un-definable, and never complete. So naturally some people gravitate to the easier – managing tasks.”
About self-organization and anarchy
“Self-organizing teams are at the core of the agile management, but the concepts have become corrupted – and counterproductive – in parts of the agile community. Although self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, contingent within the agile community who encourage an anarchistic management style and have latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy. As larger and larger organizations are implementing agile methods and practices, the core of what it means to be agile – an empowering organizational culture – may be lost because large organizations will reject the cultural piece of agile.”
About the value of a plan
“When we “plan”, we expect the actual project result to conform to that plan, and then deviations become team mistakes or sign of the team’s failure to work enough. When we “speculate”, we take the opposite perspective – it’s the plan we suspect was wrong. The plan, or speculation, is a piece of information, but it is only one piece that we will examine to determine our course of action in the next iteration.”
About software malleability
“Software is the most malleable product. Companies need to use this characteristics to their competitive advantage, and sticking to traditional waterfall development negates this advantage.”
Reference: “Agile Project Management”, Jim Highsmith, Addison-Wesley, Second Edition
The Process of Software Architecting
Published December 1st, 2009 Under Books | Leave a Comment
This book presents the influence of architecture in the software development process. The interesting aspect of this book is that is it a thoroughly presentation of the architecture role in the software development activities, not only at initial analytic stage but also at the subsequent tasks like software testing or configuration management. The book is very well structured and is certainly an excellent text book for students or for developers that are interested in getting an extensive presentation of software architecture. What I missed in the book is the presence of more “real life user stories” examples that could relate the different topics presented in the book. There is a case study used to implementing the practices, but it remains abstract to me. People looking to have more insight of what is “enough architecture” will not find some ideas on how to get the answer in this book.
Website of the book: http://www.processofsoftwarearchitecting.com/
Reference: “The Process of Software Architecting”, Peter Eeles and Peter Cripps, Addison-Wesley, 405 pages,
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk