From the Editor of Methods & Tools

Linkopedia March 2010

The Editor — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:35:15 +0000

Web site: Software Engineering Method and Theory

Web site: Rosetta Code

Blog Post: Are tools necessary for acceptance testing, or are they just evil?

Blog Post: New Agile Guidance and CMMI Guidance

Blog Post: 7 truths about Agile and Scrum that people don’t want to hear

Article: Designing Efficient SQL: A Visual Approach

Article: Are you using a toolset in your code review?

Tool: S.P.L.O.T. – Software Product Line Online Tools

Tool: RichNesse – Fitnesse WYSIWIG Editor

Tool: Review Board – Web-based code review tool

Video: Learn About Continuous Integration With Hudson

Video: A Guided Tour of a Whiteboard Culture

Video: Microsoft Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks

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.

Leading Lean Software Development – Results are not the Point

The Editor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:57:39 +0000

What fascinates me the most in the Lean software development approach is the quality of the people that support it. The Poppendieck are not an exception to this rule. Their book achieves the seemingly contradictory goals of being very insightful but still easy and captivating to read. It might be however easier to have the right flow when you are a Lean adept ;o)

The book starts with a chapter on systems thinking that takes also examples outside the software development world like Southwest Airlines. The next chapter on technical excellence is dedicated to a panorama of the software development approaches. Chapter 3 is kind of my favorite part of the book, extracting process management knowledge from the history of the construction of the Empire State Building, a project that took only one year to be completed. Chapter four presents the tools for improvement. Finally, the last part of the book is dedicated the people and leadership aspects of Lean.

The structure of the book makes it very pleasant to read, mixing the presentation of lean concepts with case studies and short personal stories. It is definitively a book that I will recommend to every software developer and manager…. and wish that every software developer and manager had read. Even if you think that Lean is not for you or you are a Toyota owner, this book provides a mind-opening text about what the values of software development and organizations should be.

Reference: “Leading Lean Software Development – Results are not the Point”, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Addison-Wesley, 278 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-62070-5

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

The Times They Are a-Changin’ ? Maybe Not

The Editor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:32:03 +0000

I will rather say that history repeats itself. By the way, this is a quote from Hegel and Marx added that first time was tragedy, and the second time farce. Yet this post is not about a Bob Dylan against Marx debate, but about a thought that came when, after following a conference presenting some of the IBM Rational products, I discovered the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative. OSLC defined itself as “a community effort to help software delivery teams by making it easier to use lifecycle tools in combination. The OSLC community is creating open, public descriptions of resources and interfaces for sharing the things that software delivery teams rely on, like change requests, test cases, defects, requirements and user stories.” I first thought that Rational Jazz, self-defined as “an open platform designed to support any industry participant who wants to improve the software lifecycle and break down walls between tools” would be the place for tool integration. Apparently building this platform was not enough to foster tool collaboration.

I was traveling back 20 year back in time when IBM already tried to combine multiple tools data in a single repository, an initiative called AD Cycle. The grails (without groovy) of having different vendors tools communicating has been since then attempted again by some other “standards” like CDIF (Common Data Interchange Format) or PCTE (Portacle Common Tool Environment). I am sure that you have all heard about these initiatives and that they are one of the key factors when you make a tool acquisition decision. Aren’t they?

One of the problems of these initiatives for uniting tools is that vendors mostly favor bilateral alliances and create integration with selected partners. However, the most important issue is that except for IBM, most of the industry players have a (very) short life expectancy. Most of them will disappear before the time needed to define and implement such standards. Anybody remember of Knowledgeware’s ADW, Index Technologies’ Excelerator or Arthur Andersen Method/1? If yes, it means that you have some gray hairs … and a good memory (let’s see the positive points). The current list of tool partners of OSLC is far from being impressive and the probabilities that this initiative will have the same fate than its predecessors are high.

Lean: Results are not the Point

The Editor — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:43:55 +0000

I have just finished reading the great book “Leading Lean Software Development” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck and I wanted to share with you two quotes excerpted from it.

[...] I started a conversation with the question that had been bothering me: “How do you reconcile the lean view that tests are waste with the need for tests in software development?” Mary’s immediate response: “Unit tests are what let you stop the line.” (quoted from the Foreword by Dottie Acton)

In our experience, the most common causes of policy-driven waste in software development are:
1. Complexity
2. Economies of scale
3. Separating decision making from work
4. Wishful thinking
5. Technical debt

The strategy of designing the effort to fit the constraints, rather than computing the constraints form the design, is absolutely the most effective way to achieve reliable delivery.

Reference: “Leading Lean Software Development – Results are not the Point”, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Addison-Wesley, 278 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-62070-5

It could seem very provocative to propose an approach based on the slogan ” Results are not the Point”. In their book, the Poppendieck defend the idea that there are many good managers around that could foster the adoption of lean practices. From my personal experience, most of the managers thinking “results are not the point” do this because they think “costs are the most important point”. This is why I think that companies that adopt agile or lean approaches want results…. and quickly! We could all wish that more managers and developers take the time to read book like this one, but even if it was the case, I am very dubious that many companies will really abandon their “command and control” and “short term vision” culture.

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

XP Day Switzerland, Geneva, March 29 2010

The Editor — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:27:36 +0000

Registration is now open for the second edition of the XP Day in Geneva. Building on the success of the first edition, the organizers have scheduled a program that should satisfy both people that want to discover what Agile is and practitioners that want to improve their agile practices. For the second year, the conference will host the Agile magicians duo composed of Portia Tung and Pascal Van Cauvenberghe that will present the “Coaching with the Wizard of Oz” Agile Fairytale.

This year the conference will also mix French- and English-speaking sessions, an improvement that should please people working for the multinational corporations and international organizations in the Lake of Geneva area.

Attendance is limited to 100 people, so be quick to register on http://www.xpday.ch/

March Software Development Conferences

The Editor — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:50:21 +0000

Here is a list of software development related conferences and events that will take place in March and that have media partnerships with Methods & Tools:

* Enterprise Software Development Conference, March 1-3 2010, San Mateo, USA

* CSM & Scrum in Depth Training with Ken Schwaber, March 3-4, Stuttgart, Germany

* TheServerSide Java Symposium, March 17-19 2010, Las Vegas, USA

* Turku Agile Day, March 17-18 2010, Turku, Finland

* Spring In Finance eXchange, March 18 2010, London, UK

* REConf 2010, March 15-18 2010, Munich, Germany

* XP Day Suisse Edition Francophone, March 29 2010, Geneva, Switzerland

* Agile Central Europe, April 8-9 2010, Krakow, Poland

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

Scrum Open Source Software Directory

The Editor — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:35:14 +0000

OpenSourceScrum.com is a new directory of open source tools for Scrum containing also links to tools reviews.

If you know a missing tool or a good review of an included tool, just let us know.

Debug It!

The Editor — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:40:40 +0000

This book provides a structured approach that will help programmers to identify and remove bugs in code. It is based on a four steps process: Reproduce, Diagnose, Fix, Reflect. For each activity, the author provides practical material on how perform it. The second part gives a higher vision of the debugging process and deal with topics like communicating with users or prioritizing bugs treatment. Finally, the book discusses special situations and the relationship between bugs and other areas of software development (source control, build, etc.).

The book is easy to read and the material is presented in a very structured way with different “viewpoints” that help to understand the content. Besides the main text where important concepts are put in evidence, real life cases shows how things happen in the real world. There are also some “Joe asks…” sections where the author answer pertinent questions on the current topic.

With my many years of experience in supporting and debugging large existing enterprise systems, I have to say that Paul Butcher summarize and structure all the knowledge (and more) that I have, sometimes painfully, accumulated during this activity. This is therefore an excellent book that I will recommend to everybody that is involved in software development in general and maintenance activities specifically.

Reference: “Debug It!”, Paul Butcher, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 214 pages, ISBN 978-1934356289

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

Linkopedia February 2010

The Editor — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:24:19 +0000

Blog Post: Mocking Mocking and Testing Outcomes.

Blog Post: Testing in the Data Center (Manufacturing No More)

Blog Post: Why Model Driven Software Development isn’t fast enough and how to fix it

Report: Incorporating Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) into Standard Life-Cycle Models

Article: Using Agile Techniques to Pay Back Technical Debt

Article: Compare JavaScript Frameworks

Article: Looking Ahead to ASP.NET 4.0

Tool: BOUML – Open source UML and code generation

Tool: StatSVN is a metrics tool for charting software evolution analyzing of Subversion repositories.

Video: Exploratory Testing: How to Test Software

Video: Benefits of Point Estimation

Video: Use a Continuous Integration Server with Hudson

Video: Extreme JavaScript Performance

How Do You Refactor Untested Code?

The Editor — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:32:52 +0000

I am currently reading the excellent “Debug It!” book written by Paul Butcher and I wanted to share with you some of the little gems that I have found in it.

“Bug fixing often uncovers opportunities for refactoring. The very fact that you’re working with code that contains a bug indicates that there is a chance that it could be clearer or better structured.”

“As a rule of thumb, for every user who tells you about a problem, there will be between 10 and 100 other users who experienced the same problem and didn’t think to get in touch.”

“Once you start to get on top of your quality issues, you’re going to want to start refactoring the old, crufty, untested code. And you should – the point of exercise is to clean up problems, and refactoring is a key element of that process. Remember, however, that refactoring crucially depends upon the support of an extensive suite of automated tests. Without tests, you’re not refactoring. You’re hacking. So, how do you refactor untested code? You don’t. The first thing you do is to write the tests.”

Source: “Debug It!”, Paul Butcher, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 214 pages

The 10 Best Software Development Conferences Videos of 2009

The Editor — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:10:47 +0000

You didn’t have the time or resources to travel last year and regret that you have missed some conferences? Now you can find a lot of complete conference sessions recording on the Web. My title has obviously a little bit of marketing twist, but I share with you a fair and diversified selection of excellent conferences presentations videos. Here is my list “in no particular order” as they say on TV.

What they Don’t Teach You About Software at School: Be Smart!

This is a keynote given by Ivar Jacobson at Jazoon. One of the most popular buzzwords in software development is agile. Today everyone wants to be agile. That is good! However, being agile is not enough. You also need to be smart.

http://jazoon.com/

Challenges and Opportunities for Python

In this PyCon 2009 talk Ted Leung discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that he sees for Python.

http://us.pycon.org/

Just For Fun: Rediscovering Coding as a Hobby

In this RubyConf talk, Adam Keys talks about getting back when coding was more fun and less serious.

http://rubyconf.org/

Nano-Incremental Development, a.k.a. Elephant Carpaccio

During this Agile Roots workshop, Alistair Cockburn made people think about cutting features requests in small pieces.

http://www.agileroots.com/

Design Fundamentals for Developers

At the Microsoft’s Mix conference, Robby Ingebretsen presented the fundamentals of interface design for developers.

http://live.visitmix.com/

Reading the Flex Source Code

In this talk at 360Flex, Jonathan Branam gave an introduction to the Flex source code, explaining the class hierarchy, compositional classes and the importance of interfaces

http://www.360flex.com/

Patterns for Lovers of JavaScript

In this talk at JSConf 2009, Petter Higgins shows that Dojo teaches fundamentally sounds techniques for high performance JavaScript applications across the board. You will learn how these techniques provide a stable, professional-grade foundation for creating highly maintainable, scalable projects of any size

http://jsconf.us/

Kanban, Flow & Cadence

During this Lean Software & Systems Conference session, Karl Scotland introduced the three lean concepts of Kanban, Flow and Cadence, which combine to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the typical timebox-based approaches used by more traditional Agile methods.

http://www.leanssc.org/conferences/

GWT Can Do What?!?! A Preview of Google Web Toolkit 2.0

In this talk at the Google I/O 2009 conference, Bruce Johnson presents the new version of GWT.
GWT 2.0 contains huge improvements, including dynamic script loading, a new catalog of compiler optimizations, and a new approach to hosted mode debugging that promises to revolutionize your productivity.

http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html

C++, Java and .NET: Lessons Learned from the Internet Age

Java’s appearance at the dawn of the Internet Age helped to propel it to near-instant prominence, and lodged cross-platform virtual machines and garbage-collection firmly into our mainstream consciousness. In Java’s wake, .NET introduced the concept of the “cross-language” virtual machine, and helped to foster a new discussion on the benefits of functional programming. Did Java and C# have an evolutionary advantage over C++, or were they simply “Cool” (the original code name for C# / .NET)?

http://www.oredev.org/

You Want More?

If you want to search for more videos, SoftDevTube.com has currently catalogued and classified more than 1600 software development videos, screencasts and tutorials. To prepare your conference schedule for this year or find more conferences archives, go to SoftDevConferences.com. If you want to read some in-depth articles on software development topics, visit the Methods & Tools magazine web site and download past PDF issues.

Changing Perspectives

The Editor — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:41:52 +0000

“In the early days of our industry, programmers wrote in assembly code, selecting registers in which to place variables and managing memory explicitly. If we had magically provided these programmers with a Smalltalk compiler, they might have asked, “How does this help us select registers? How do we allocate memory?” They might have concluded, “”We don’t want no stinkin’ Smalltalk!”

Old and new programmers are still writing programs, but the technology to achieve the goal has changed. When a new technology is sufficiently different, you can’t evaluate it in terms of the old technology.”

Source: Stephen J. Mellor, Letters section, IEEE Software, March/April 2004

Sometimes new ways of doing things come in our life and it might be difficult to adapt. If you are used to drive a car and you take a train, you don’t ask how you are going to “turn left”: the train just follows the tracks. However, you have now to go to a station, buy a ticket, look at timetable, etc… This could be the same thing with some of the software development approaches that have recently become popular.

Functional programming, domain driven design or frameworks that favors convention over configuration like Ruby on Rails can offer a new perspective about what you have to do to develop software. If you have the time (and the energy) I would like to strongly encourage you inform you about these approaches or even better to try them. Ironically, the above quotation was in reply of a letter about UML and Model Driven Architecture. Six years after, there is not a lot of people still caring about this way of developing software, as it is for Smalltalk or assembly languages.

Resources

* Wikipedia.

Functional Programming

Domain Driven Design

Convention over configuration

* Articles

Functional programming – HaskellWiki

Functional Programming For The Rest of Us

Ruby on Rails guides

An Introduction to Web Development Using the Ruby on Rails Framework

An Introduction To Domain-Driven Design

An Introduction to Domain Driven Design

Linkopedia January 2010

The Editor — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:50:21 +0000

Blog Post: High quality in application development without unit testing

Blog Post: The Problem with User Stories

Blog Post: Getting Real: the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals

Blog Post: A complete blog engine using Django in 60 minutes

Blog Post: UI Test Automation Tools are Snake Oil

Article: Love and Marriage: CMMI and Agile Need Each Other

Article: Speaking the Java language without an accent

Article: DSL Evolution

Tool: GMetrics provides metrics for Groovy source code

Tool: Google’s framework for writing C++ tests on a variety of platforms

Video: Is Microsoft Going Agile? Insights from Scott Guthrie

Video: Achieving Web Test Automation with a Mixed-Skill

Video: Event Driven Architecture

Review of 2009 for Software Development: Many Acquisitions and a Funeral

The Editor — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:27:19 +0000

Last year has certainly been busy for the software development tools industry. We have seen many companies merging together and also the funeral of one of the oldest brand in the software development industry.

Bye, Bye Borland

After the sale of its development tools division to Embarcadero in 2008, Borland kept only the tools dealing with requirements management and software testing. This didn’t improve its financial situation and finally Borland sold itself to MicroFocus. This was a sad end for a brand that accompanied software developer for more than 25 years. Software requirements have always been a secondary topic in the software development tools world and the trend towards agility hasn’t improved this. Now you can manage user stories with paper cards and a board. Approaches like UML are declining and you will find few items dealing with them in today’s programmers waterhole like dzone.com or stackoverflow.com, The end of Borland is just the symptom that this world is difficult for requirements tools vendors.

Oracle Buys Sun, WMware Buys Spring and You Buy Software

With a little bit of irony, just one year after having bought MySQL, Sun was acquired by Oracle. It is difficult to judge a deal that is not completed yet as the European Commission is still examining the merger. I am however afraid that the business and financial objectives of Oracle will largely lead to the reduction or the end of most of the Sun open source efforts and a serious slowdown in MySQL evolution.

Just after the future of Java becomes a topic of discussion after the deal between Oracle and Sun, WMware decided to acquire SpringSource and to give to this entity a stronger platform to promote the Java language. Since then, SpringSource has launched its Tomcat server version, Enterprise Java Cloud and Spring Roo. Previously it had acquired G2One at the end of 2008 and thus the control of the Groovy and Grails products. It is now surely the most important active player for Java software development tools.

Google is (also) a Software Development Tools Company

Google domination in the search engine world is well known, but as far as developers are concerned, it is amazing how Google is quietly occupying more and more space. Here are some of the software development initiatives of Google:
* Google App Engine
* Google Web Toolkit GWT
* Go Language
* Google open source projects forge
* Google I/O Conference

Google seems to have understood that besides the content, it should also be active in the plumbing that runs the Web. This is why software developers should be interested in what Google does in this area. You could do this following some blogs like the Google Code Blog and the Google Testing Blog. You will see that besides the well-known projects, Google releases a lot of interesting open source tools created by its development team.

Agile Project Management

The Editor — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:47:06 +0000

The fact that this book is already at his second edition after a first publication in 2004 says something about its value. In one of his definition of Agile, Jim Highsmith says, “Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability”. I will say that his book balances nicely high level thinking and a pragmatic approach. The book provides a framework for running agile projects and gives also insight in some more neglected related topics like managing projects portfolios or measuring the success of Agile projects.

The author starts by defining what Agility is and emphasizes that Agile is about “delivering value over meeting constraints”. The book describes the Agile Project Management (APM) framework, discussing its values and presenting the phases (Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close). The core values of the APM are:
* Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints
* Leading the Team over Managing Tasks
* Adapting to Change over Conforming to Plans.
All these aspects are covered with both a high level vision (after all values are values), but also by describing daily project activities: Key points that will help you understand the author message are put in evidence. Example: A coaching leader’s attitude is reflected in the question “How can I help you deliver results?” The micro-manager’s attitude is reflected in the question, “Why isn’t task 412 done yet?”

The final parts of the book deal with topics related to Agile project management: scaling, project portfolio management, measuring performance and fostering innovation. This is definitely a book that I will recommend to every people involved in project management, agile or not. I always think that learning Agile practices should be preceded by understanding Agile values. This book provides insightful material for values and practices.

Related web sites:
* Jim Highsmith Web site
* Agile Project Leadership Network

Reference: “Agile Project Management”, Second Edition, Jim Highsmith, Addison-Wesley, 392 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

Scrum Meet-up with Jeff Sutherland, 25 January, Zurich

The Editor — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:16:59 +0000

Jeff Sutherland visits Switzerland on 25 January 2010. At the meetup, he will give a talk on a state of the art Scrum topic and you will have the opportunity to ask questions and mingle with other Scrum users. Please find the details of the event below.

Language: English
Place: Technopark Zürich, Seminarraum Fortran
Date: 25 January 2010 at 7.30 pm
Price: Free
Max seats: 60 (First come – first served) sandwiches aand drinks will be served

Please note that due to limited seats, registration is required and could be made via sec @ trifork [dot] com.

You Are the Raw Material of Software Development. Are You Good Enough?

The Editor — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:52:20 +0000

The end of the year is a time where you do some cleaning. During this activity, I found an old issue of IEEE Software where I had noticed an article as a source of interesting software development quotes about people issue. As New Year is also the time to take good resolutions, this should help us to deal with average people that we mostly are… and with the below average developers that normally will not read this ;o)

“Any construction project begins with raw material, and as Confucius suggests, the nature of the raw material is critical to success – so much that you shouldn’t even begin if the “wood” is poor. Even if you have sharp, finely honed tools, your project will still fail if the raw material isn’t sound. And what, might you ask, is the raw material of software development? Us. People. We are the only raw material of consequences in software development.

[....] So how do we prepare this material? Obviously, we don’t want it to be “rotten”, but how can we tell? How can we tell if hidden voids lurk beneath the surface, just waiting to ruin the project once we start carving? When you lack the right material, you’ll keenly feel its absence. For example, warning signs might include:
* The developer who only uses one favorite solution for every problem
* Folks who don’t learn from mistakes – or worse, are too afraid to make any
* The developer who can’t be bothered to tell anyone what he’s doing and why

[...] Painful as it is to admit it, for most people, most of the time, the problems that come up are our own fault – not the compiler’s, not the OS’s, not the database vendor’s, not our bosses’, and not our coworkers’. Yet many people and team, when facing a disastrous problem, first embark on a search (aka witch-hunt) to fix the blame. It goes somewhat against human nature, but you should always try to fix the problem, not the blame. Remember we all write software in our heads, so it makes sense to go ahead and take responsibility for it. “The cat ate my source code” just doesn’t cut it anymore – when problem come up, we need to invent options, not excuses.

[...] The isolated, lone developer huddled over a terminal with a can of highly caffeinated cola offers not only an inaccurate and misleading stereotype, but a dangerous one as well. Isolated developers can inadvertently duplicate other teammates’ work, use outdated or inappropriate methods, and even build the wrong product – at least, not the product the sponsor wanted. Instead of taking more Java and UML courses, we should work on our technical writing, public speaking, and group facilitation. A CPU with no I/O isn’t very useful. Neither is a developer who can’t communicate.”

Source: Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, “Preparing the Raw Material”, IEEE Software, September/October 2003

My only disagreement with the authors is that I think that the end users are also essential raw material in software development, but I fully agree with the idea that we should take responsibility for our own limits. Fresh out of the University, one of the first important modification that I did created a big trouble, because I didn’t tested it with the right files, even if my supervisor suggested this to me ;o( This taught me that being confident with my work could be good… but thoroughly testing it was even better ,o)

The Consultant, the Coach and Delivering Value

The Editor — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:37:22 +0000

The Winter 2009 issue of Methods & Tools contains an interesting article from Rachel Davies about Agile Coaching Tips. She shares her experience that is also available in the excellent book that she wrote with Liz Sedley. When I reviewed her book this summer, I started thinking about the coaching role that external people are now assuming versus the traditional consultant position. On the same question I saw a recent blog post discussing the utility of agile coaches. The author said that you should accept advice only from people that had achieved themselves something big, citing personalities like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds.

Software consultants are people hired on a temporary base mostly for what they are able to achieve. They will develop part of a software system or manage a project (I don’t want to talk here about consultants that are just hired to produce PowerPoint presentations). They will also provide some knowledge transfer to internal employees that are new to a specific technology. On the other side, the goal of agile coaching is more often to improve behavioral skills. Sport teams provide the first example of a coaching role that could come to your mind. There are however some differences. The agile coach aims at producing a self-organizing team and he acts only when issues occur to suggest solutions. The sport coach has authority over teams. He directs players’ roles and activities, although you should not minimize the roles of players as leaders especially in professional teams. The situation of coach of individual champions is also different, as the athlete usually chooses them… and fires them also.

The current agile adoption trend favors coaching and the economic crisis could be a catalyst to change work practices. However, I have few illusions that most of the corporations’ managers are truly embracing agile values. Getting up in higher management is still predominantly a power struggle, with more political consideration than the goal to empower employees. Many managers’ main objective is to justify their job (did you ever wonder why there are so many meetings?) and creating a self-organizing team is not intuitively something that helps to achieve this goal. Upper managers mostly don’t care about the type of software development process. They want working software applications delivered quickly and for a minimum cost. They will pay for Agile practices as long as they think that it could provide what they want and “cure” the problems that they attribute to their current software development model. They did the same thing before with Structured Analysis, Information Engineering, RAD, Object Orientation, CMM, ISO 9000 or UML – RUP (you can add your own silver bullet approach in this list). The name of “coach” or “consultant” can be used for external help, but ultimately companies will pay for people that deliver short term results and improving developers working condition is not always included in the list of valuable results. This is sad for Agile and developers as it could be one of the few approaches that value “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools“.

Linkopedia December 2009

The Editor — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:03:04 +0000

Post: Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Post: Programmers humor

Post: Reduce Manual Test Debt

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

Winter 2009 issue of Methods & Tools

The Editor — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:33:26 +0000

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