Software Linkopedia August 2011

Published August 15th, 2011 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Find more interesting links 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.

Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust

Published August 9th, 2011 Under Books | Leave a Comment

The title of this book from Watts S. Humphrey is a little bit deceiving as its main focus is rather on the Team Software Process (TSP). If you are your interested in a broader perspective on software development management or leadership, you should rather read Humphrey’s “Reflections on Management“. The information in the book is well structured and the mix between the theory and practice parts is fairly balanced. I will recommend this book to every software development manager and project manager who is interested in getting an additional perspective on how to improve its projects results. Read a complete review of Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust

Reference: “Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust”, Watts S. Humphrey and James W. Over, Addison-Wesley, 309 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-62450-5

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

Software Linkopedia July 2011

Published July 19th, 2011 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Blog: A simulation to show the importance of backlog prioritization

Blog: Measuring Code

Blog: Working with the testing debt – part 3

Article: Are You a Whole Team?

Article: Agile Project Dashboards

Article: Power and Influence Charting: The Google Way

Tool: Reqline Requirement Management Tool

Tool: ckwnc – creating UML sequence diagrams online

Video: How to Decrease the Pain in Building Distributed Systems

Video: Kanban for Government Projects

Video: Introduction to Graph Databases

Job: Agile Software Tester, Confidential, Redmond, WA

Job: Software Test Engineer (SDET), Microsoft , Redmond, WA

When Agile Values Meet Mere Mortals Behavior

Published June 27th, 2011 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment

We are celebrating this year the tenth anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. As Agility has become popular in software development organizations, you can see more and more material about the fact that Agile has “lost its soul”. People would be more “doing Agile”, that is following “blindly” some routines, than “being Agile”. I would define Agile as the human vision software development: we accept uncertainty but we can aim at providing value developing software through collaboration. Plan-driven approaches, often grouped under the “Waterfall” name, are the engineering vision of software development: people know what they want and we can mostly accurately estimate how to get there and deliver the final product following a detailed plan.

Individuals are the main pillar of the Agile culture as “individuals and interactions” are present in the first of the Agile manifesto values. As the issues in plan-driven project could be attributed to a lack of consideration of human factors, the problems in Agile project will rather be of the over-reliance on individuals. Individuals are the most important success factor in software development projects, but they are also the most important failure factor, due to the inherent weaknesses of our human condition. Trying to blame the “Waterfall” is a nice way to say that every project could succeed, but things might be a little bit more complicated than this. Read more