From the Editor of Methods & Tools » agile

Software Testing & Quality in Methods & Tools Summer 2010

The Editor — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:59:13 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Summer 2010 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Aspects of Kanban – Lean Worfklow Management
* Test Language – Introduction to Keyword Driven Testing
* A High Volume Software Product Line
* Better Requirements Definition Management is Better for Business
* The Core Protocols, an Experience Report – Tools for High Performance Teams
* Tool: eValid- Functional and Load Web Testing
* Tool: Hudson- Continuous Integration Server
* Tool: FitNesse – Test Cases Management
* Tool: VoodooMock – Mock Objects Framework for C++
* Conference: Jazoon

80 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer10

Lean Agile Software Development

The Editor — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:58:27 +0000

The goal of this book is to propose a vision of Agile software development that goes behind the current practices, more specifically Scrum, to integrate the principles of Lean development. To achieve this objective, the authors draw on their own experience in Agile consulting.

The book starts with a presentation of Agile and Lean principles. The second part explains how Lean adoption can improve the usage of Scrum with an interesting table comparing Scrum and Lean accompanied by a list of practices to avoid. It devotes specific chapters to topics like release planning, visual control, quality assurance, product coordination and architecture. A final part is dedicated to more insight in the Lean approach. The book is pleasant to read. Each chapter has an abstract and the beginning and a summary at the end with some questions and further reading recommendations.

Besides the sometimes-annoying references to the authors consulting firm, this book provides interesting material on specific aspects of Agile software development projects at an enterprise level. Its main difference with other books on the same topic is for me the treatment of the management aspects of software development as the authors make their point for a stronger management role and intervention in Agile projects. This book will therefore bring more benefits to project and development managers that work for large organizations where the control aspect is important and the words “self-organizing teams” could be a serious “career limitation” move.

Reference

“Lean-Agile Software Development”, Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James R. Trott, Addison-Wesley, 262 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-53289-3

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

Quotes

“What we need is a new attitude about process and how to manage process. Processes must be designed to assist the team in achieving management’s goal. Processes help the team get its job done: they represent accountability among team members about how they will work. [...] Is this possible? Yes! Lean provides the principles we need to do this. And we will not follow these principles blindly.”

“We often think of software as the end goal. But it is not. Software is a means to an end – a way of getting value to the customer.”

“Agile project management done in isolation violates the Lean principle of optimizing the whole. [...] There are other alternatives to Scrum, including Crystal, Feature-Driven Development and Kanban software development. They are good and they address specific challenges for teams. However, they, like Scrum, do not entirely address the bigger picture. By themselves, they do not address the entire value stream, which is what is needed.”

“While Scrum works well at the team level, using it as the primary method to guide Agility at the enterprise level has severe challenges.”

“Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle define the Daily Meeting as composed only of team members, explicitly removing management from it – and subtly implying management is not accountable for deliverables.”

“Scrum works by exposing inadequacies or dysfunctions within an organization’s product and development practices. [...] The Scrum community generally concedes that about three in four of organizations implementing Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits from it that they hoped for. The explanation is that many organizations change Scrum in order to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions of the organization rather than solving their organizational problems. The implication is that Scrum gives them the tools to see but not to change.”

Defining “Done” Completely in Scrum

The Editor — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:21:10 +0000

I have published on DevAgile.com another report from the Jazoon conference in Zurich. Ken Schwaber talked about the importance of having a good definition of the concept of “done” and the lack of technical practices in Scrum projects that lead to technical debt.

Read this report here

Agile Software Development Adoption Obstacles

The Editor — Mon, 31 May 2010 12:46:43 +0000

I have just started reading the book “Succeeding with Agile” by Mike Cohn. Here are some quotes from the initial pages that deal with the difficulties of transitioning to Agile.

“I’ve personally witnessed several failed agile adoptions that could have been prevented. The first was in a company that had spent more than a million dollars on its transition effort. Executives brought in outside trainers and coaches and hired five people into an “Agile Office” to which new Scrum teams could turn for advice. The company’s failure was the result of thinking that the implications of adopting Scrum would be restricted to only the development organization. The executives who initiated this transition thought that educating and supporting developers would be sufficient. They failed to consider how Scrum would touch the work of salespeople, the marketing group, and even the finance department. Without changes to these areas, organizational gravity pulled the company back where it had started.”

“Perhaps you’ve read a book, on Extreme Programming and have decided that is the right approach for your company. Or maybe you attended a Certified ScrumMaster training course and think Scrum sounds good. Or maybe you read a book on a different agile process, and it sounds perfect for your organization.
In all likelihood, you’re wrong.
None of these processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry.”

“With most organizational change, after someone figures out the right or best way to do something, that way of doing it is captured as a ” best practice” and shared with everyone else. For some types of work, collecting and reusing best practices is a tremendous aid to the change effort. An organization that is selling a product to a new type of customer may, for example, capture best practices for overcoming objections from potential customers. When transitioning to Scrum, however, collecting best practices can be dangerous.”

What is interesting for me in these quotes is the emphasis on Agile being a process and not a technique. You can’t just apply existing recipes to your organization and think that you are “done”. You have to think on how you can spread the spirit of Agile in your organization and, when you think you are “done”, continue to try to improve your process every day. The same message is conveyed in a Karl Scotland article about Kanban that I am just reviewing and that will be included in the Summer 2010 issue of Methods & Tools. Another very interesting article by Yves Yves Hanoulle on Core Protocols will give you tools to support the improvement process.

Reference: “Succeeding With Agile”, Mike Cohn, Addison-Wesley, 463 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-57936-3

Methods & Tools articles on Agile adoption

Adopting an Agile Method

Agile Delivery at British Telecom

Creating an Agile Environment

Agile Coaching Tips

Five Symptoms of Mechanical Agile

Unified Modeling Language (UML) Still Widely Used

The Editor — Tue, 25 May 2010 08:09:29 +0000

In 1997, the Object Management Group (OMG) made the UML a standard modelling language for object-oriented applications. Has the Agile adoption changed the way organizations use UML? Methods & Tools checked the current UML current usage with a poll asking the following question: What is the usage of UML modeling techniques at your location?:

Not using	30%
Partial implementation (adoption of some UML techniques)	25%
Partial deployment (some projects are using UML)	20%
Deployed (all new projects are using UML)	14%
Abandoned	11%

Participants: 134
Ending date: May 2010
Source: Methods & Tools

The Agile approach prefers face to face communication between developers and user. Feedback is quickly provided as short iterations deliver working software. User stories could be specified in simpler artifacts like index cards rather than put larger requirements documents. Some people are even saying that there should be no other documentation than working code, the only artifact that is always updated in a software development project. I was therefore a little bit surprised that despite the popularity of Agile on software development web sites and its increasing large survey adoption numbers, the usage of UML in the organizations has not decreased since 2005.

In our poll, only 11 % of the participants have stopped using UML. The current level of partial or full deployment is around 60%. Results of a similar poll conducted in 2005 were that 55% of the participants were in a partial or full deployment stage, but at that times 16% of the participants were investigating or running pilot projects with UML. So we had a potential usage of UML by 71% of the participants. With the numbers of the current survey for abandons and participants still using the UML, we reach a very close figure of 70%. I know that Methods & Tools readers and visitors have a high interest on the UML, as I published many articles on this approach in previous year, but another 2008 survey showed also that Agile was partially or completely adopted by more than 50% of the same population.

The Agile approach is certainly not against the UML. We should always remember that the Agile Manifesto says “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more”. There are many reasons why Agility and UML coexist in the same organization. First, UML has been more widely adopted by larger organization where projects are bigger and the need for more formal documentation is important. These organizations have seen the transition to agile more as a change in their project management process, but they mostly kept their specialized work structure (business analysts, developers, testers) and their tools. Then, the need for an architectural support to the development of complex system is recognized in the Agile community and UML offer useful tools to meet this need. Finally, if a user story could be easily summarized with few words (as a…. I want … so that…), it could need a more detailed description to be developed and automatically tested. UML use cases are very suitable tools to describe interaction and results of a user scenario.

Related Methods & Tools articles

Related Resources

Linkopedia May 2010

The Editor — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:06:28 +0000

Blog: How to make Scrum fail

Blog: New Programming Jargon

Blog: The 9 Capabilities of Communicators

Article: Test Driven Development using Flash Builder 4 and FlexUnit

Article: Common Product Owner Traps

Article: The Busy Developer’s Guide to SQL Server Modeling

Tool: Instant Django is a portable Django development environment for Windows

Tool: theSCRUM is a free solution for teams using Scrum

Tool: Tattletale gets you an overview of your project or a product.

Video: Continuous Integration and the “Cup of Coffee” Test

Video: Using FireBug to Debug JavaScript

Video: Selenium + FitNesse – A QA Multiplier Effect

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.

Ten Articles to Learn More on Test-Driven Development (TDD)

The Editor — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:56:58 +0000

The software development articles directory has just passed the mark of 2000 articles categorized in its database. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is currently a topic of debate in the software development community, as even the value of unit testing is questioned. Here is my selection of 10 interesting TDD articles that should help you get more knowledge on this topic. I have tried to find items that could apply more specifically to different programming languages.

* Improving Application Quality Using Test-Driven Development (TDD)

* Introduction to Test Driven Design (TDD)

* TDD from scratch

* Demystifying Extreme Programming: Test-Driven Programming

* TDD – FDD – BDD… Why not PDD?

* Using JMock in Test Driven Development

* Mocking the Embedded World: Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Design Patterns

* Test-Driven Development in Python

* Apply Test-Driven Development to your Database Projects

* Unit testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) for Flex and ActionScript 3.0

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

The Editor — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:56:18 +0000

Object orientation (OO) is not a trendy concept these days, but it hasn’t certainly lost it values. The purpose of this book is to integrate the development of object oriented software with the test-driven development (TDD) approach, more specifically in Java. It starts with an introduction to TDD and the tools (Junit, jMock2) that will be used. It describes then in detail the TDD process that is then illustrated by a large example. The book ends with more software testing topics like tests smells or tests readability. A final part is dedicated to special aspects of testing like persistence, threads and asynchronous code.

The book could be read from start to end or be used as a reference book. In the preface, the authors say that the book is intended for developers with professional experience and some first knowledge of TDD. It really goes far beyond “toy” examples that you can find in programming learning books. The content is a balanced mix of concepts, examples and diagrams that makes it easy to read. Besides what could be considered “catchy” acronyms (OO+TDD), this book is an excellent reference on how to design and program software (the authors use the nice concept of “growing” software). I will consider it a must for anyone programming in Java, but I will also recommend it to people programming in other languages, as the thinking process could be applied in other contexts and with similar tools.

Reference: “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests”, Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce, Addison-Wesley, 358 pages, ISBN 978-0-321-50362-7

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

Quotes

“What if software wasn’t “made”, like we make a paper airplane – finish folding it and fly it away? What if, instead, we treated software more like a valuable, productive plant, to be nurtured, pruned, harvested, fertilized, and watered? Traditional farmers know how to keep plants productive for decades or even centuries. How would software development be different if we treated our programs the same way?”

“As John Gall wrote in “The Systems Bible: The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small”: a complex systems that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works”.

“Sometimes we find it difficult to write a test for some functionality we want to add to our code. In our experience, this usually means that our design can be improved – perhaps the class is too tightly coupled to its environment or does not have clear responsibilities. When this happens, we first check whether it’s an opportunity to improve our code, before working around the design by making the test more complicated or using more sophisticated tools. We’ve found that the qualities that make an object easy to test also make our code responsive to change.”

Does Size Matter (in Software Development)?

The Editor — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:52:23 +0000

When friends ask me what is the last trend in software development, I answer Lean. This approach is even easier to describe, because you can take examples outside the software industry and the most famous of them is Toyota. The recent problems faced by the Japanese car manufacturer shows that every idea could get difficulties fostering its original values when scaling and software development is no exception to this rule. I know that the Toyota situation is complex and I still believe that they did a nice job creating a special corporate culture, but for the public their image problem is there.

Agile has become “the thing to do” in software development and is now being used as the (marketing) label of every new initiative or tool. As a result, the fate of the original values of Agile Manifesto are to be diluted at best, abused at worst. I believe that the Agile Manifesto signatories were motivated by a sincere goal to give to the people involved in software development projects a better situation at a time when there could be a tendency to consider them as mere procedure performers. However, as the agile ideas spread and became successful, they meet the fact that software development is also a business for software tools vendors, consulting organizations… and media like Methods & Tools. Going from selling toaster to selling agile toaster could be now a mandatory move to be listed in the LeadingAnalystFirm Bermuda Triangle report and the front page of the press. It will however not bring any real benefits to agile or to toasters. A recent trade magazine report and tool vendor press release spoke about “taming the agile beast”. This looks like a strange appreciation of Agile. Are thinking software developers dangerous animals? Does this mean that it is times to dump Mike Cohn and instead hire Siegfried and Roy to lead your projects? As Agile spreads, so are the chances that its initial ideas will be misunderstood… and that the number of failed projects claiming to follow the Agile approach will (strongly?) increase. I add the “claim” part, because some Agilists will reply that “true” Agile project cannot fail, but this would be the topic for another discussion.

Sir Winston Churchill said “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” The fact that it could be difficult to keep the ideal of approaches that rely strongly on participants’ behavior when you scale them should not prevent us to aim for the best objectives. We have however to be realistic on the real world constraints, adapt to them and recognize that we cannot always reach perfection ;o) On this topic, I recommend the excellent books of Craig Larman and Bas Vodde on scaling lean and agile development. In the introduction of their first volume, they wrote: “Start with a small group of great people and only grow when it really starts to hurt”. I could not give you a better advice. In our software development world, the “too big to fail” motto could easily be replaced by “too big to succeed”.

Agile + Software Testing & Quality in Methods & Tools Spring 2010

The Editor — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:19:19 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Spring 2010 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Using WatiN to Leverage Common Elements in Web Testing – structure your Web testing efforts
* Five Symptoms of Mechanical Agile- detect agile adoption issues
* Writing Testable Code – testable code is better code
* Model-Based Testing Adds Value – a quicker way to functional testing plans
* Tool: Sonar – monitor code and project quality
* Tool: Express Agile Project Management – a simple tool for Scrum
* Tool: Apache JMeter – for load and functional testing

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?spring10

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.