Muddy Software Architecture

Published January 30th, 2012 Under Quotes | Leave a Comment

“If the layered style is the most common targeted style [in software architecture], the big ball of mud style is perhaps the one most often actually achieved. It is characterized by the absence of any evident structure, or perhaps vestiges of now-eroded structure. Also typical is promiscuous sharing of information, sometimes to the extent that data structures become effectively global. Although the module, runtime, or allocation organization can be a mess, it often starts in the module viewtype and spreads elsewhere. Repairs and maintenance are expedient and resemble crude patches rather than elegant refactorings. No effort is made to enforce any conceptual integrity or consistency. Read more

Software Development Linkopedia January 2012

Published January 18th, 2012 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Here is our selection of interesting knolwedge material on programming, software testing and project management:

Web Site: Understanding JavaScript OOP

Web Site: Cherry Pop – Development Diary

Web Site: Mikado Method

Blog: Diversity Imbalance

Blog: Kicking ass together: How to improve coding skills as a group

Blog: Tips for Testing Database Code

Article: Creating Your First Spring Web MVC Application

Article: Who Cooked My Goose?

Tool: Ebselen – A mavenised Selenium test framework

Tool: Phake – PHP Mocking Framework

Video: Beheading the Software Beast

Video: Offshore Outsourcing with Scrum

Video: Agile UML Modeling

Video: Big Design Up Front is Dead

Video: Code Contracts in .NET 4

Find more interesting knowledge and content on the software development resources directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

The Meaning of Agile Certification is Money

Published January 9th, 2012 Under Software Development | 2 Comments

On page 483 of their book ” Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development“, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde discuss about the quality of code and certification, mainly in within the CMMI context. They refute the link between good code production and certification and wrote “Do not believe that an appraisal, rating, or certification in any process improvement model – including Scrum, agile methods and ISO certification – means much of anything, other than the ability to somehow pass an appraisal at least once.”

Although I usually agree with them, I would disagree on this point. Certification has its meaning. And this meaning is money. Certification has become an important business and this is why you have so many “independent” professional associations that now provide some type of certification. In the Agile project management world, you can be
* a certified ScrumMaster from the Scrum Alliance
* a Professional ScrumMaster from Scrum.org
* a PMI Agile Certified Practitioner from the Project Management Institute (PMI)

In addition, you can now become a certified Agile tester or Product Owner. I am myself planning to create a Certified Agile Blogger status. Read more

Agile Culture, Scrum, User Experience and Software Architecture in the Winter 2011 issue of Methods & Tools

Published December 21st, 2011 Under Methods & Tools | Leave a Comment

Methods & Tools – the free magazine for software developers, testers and project managers – has just published its Winter 2011 issue with the following articles that focuses mainly on agile project management, software architecture and user experience. In addition, four open source software development tools are presented, two for software testing and two for project management. Winter 2011 issue content:

* How to Make Your Culture Work with Agile, Kanban & Software Craftsmanship
* How Software Architecture Learns
* Understanding of Burndown Chart
* The Psychology of UX – Part 2
* Cucumber: Behavior Driven Development in Ruby
* Sureassert Exemplars: Java Unit Testing Without Unit Tests
* ChiliProject: Modular Open Source Web-based Project Management
* Scrum-it: Virtual Open Source Scrum Board Application

70 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?winter11