#agile (77 links)
- Story Points Revisited ronjeffries.com
The focus on more gets in the way of increasing value. Increasing pressure to do more almost inevitably has a bad result: the team tries to go faster, and wind up skimping on code quality and on tests. They soon begin shipping more defects, slowing down because of the increased rework to fix the defects, and slowing down even more because the code quality rapidly declines. Things get worse and worse, pressure increases, and it becomes a race to disaster.
Missed this first time around. The demo technique is uncannily similar to how we've ended up working. This is a wonderful articulation.
- Successful iteration requires going beyond agile uxdesign.cc
UX methods are cheaper, faster, and better at gathering data than “build, measure, learn” — but they don’t work inside agile development.
Most agile is incremental delivery of a pre-selected way.
- Walking Skeleton wiki.c2.com
"A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel." -- Alistair Cockburn
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
- You Can’t Make a Skateboard into a Car - SolutionsIQ solutionsiq.com
An attempt at modifying the original "skateboard to car" agile analogy to not require additional context.
- Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals jeremiahlee.com
Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.
- Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- Dark Scrum ronjeffries.com
- Scrum disempowers developers | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum okigiveup.net
- Giles Bowkett: Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die In A Fire gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
An excellent dissection of Scrum...
<blockquote>In other words, in its best-case scenario, Scrum's a dog-and-pony show. But that best-case scenario is rare. In the much more common case, Scrum covers up the inability to recruit (or even recognize) engineering talent, which is currently one of the most valuable things in the world, with a process for managing engineers as if they were cogs in a machine, all of equal value.
And one of the most interesting things about Scrum is that it tries to enhance the accountability of a field of work where both failure and success are obvious to the naked eye - yet I've never encountered any similarly elaborate system of rituals whose major purpose is to enhance the accountability of fields which have actual accountability problems. </blockquote>
- Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility) - PragDave pragdave.me
What to do:
Find out where you are Take a small step towards your goal Adjust your understanding based on what you learned Repeat How to do it:
When faced with two of more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.
- FlaccidScrum martinfowler.com
<blockquote>Scrum seems to be particularly common as the nominative process the team is following. For many people, this situation is exacerbated by Scrum because Scrum is process that's centered on project management techniques and deliberately omits any technical practices, in contrast to (for example) Extreme Programming.</blockquote>
- Scrum: Agile madness | www.jillesvangurp.com jillesvangurp.com
<blockquote>"You can’t substitute experience with process and that is exactly what agile followers end up doing. Take away the experienced people and you have a lot of people executing the rituals of scrum, kanban, or whatever without really understanding what they are doing. The assumption that that will work at all is naive at best and actually rather delusional."</blockquote>
We don't pitch often, but when we do the question of pitching creative work usually crops up. We never do it, even when - as happened when we pitched for ITV - other people we're pitching against do, and we want it, and there is pressure to conform. But it would be utterly wrong to talk about how important it is to discover and validate the customer need and problem space if the very first thing we produce for a client presents completely the opposite approach. Doing creative work at the pitch stage is a dangerous fiction
- Agile Software Is A Cop-Out; Here’s What’s Next | Forrester Blogs blogs.forrester.com
Yes.
- Codesion - Code, Test and Deploy in the Cloud blog.codesion.com
"A step-by-step rundown on how to set up a solid Agile process for coding, testing, and deploying via the cloud." with MikeCI and Codesion
- How to really make something slideshare.net
"...that people actually want". Rapid app/product development ideas from MBM.
- Hacker News | All of the "heavy" agiles like Scrum have confused me: isn't agile about fundame... news.ycombinator.com
"All of the 'heavy' agiles like Scrum have confused me: isn't agile about fundamentally less process and more flexibility? One can't serve two masters. Teams have to pick a point along the completely structured - completely flexible line. As far as I'm concerned, these flavors of agile are just wolves in sheep's clothing that allow existing waterfall autocrats to continue their reign under the guise of adopting 'agile.'" Amen to that. Use the parts that make sense, jettison the parts with large overheads and ideology. Be pragmatic.
- gerrit - Project Hosting on Google Code code.google.com
A web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system.
- Always ship trunk paulhammond.org
Why web applications are different to installed apps, problems that none of the revision control systems solve, and how you can solve some of them yourself within your app.
- Pivotal Tracker - Free Lightweight Agile Project Management & Team Collaboration, from Pivotal Labs pivotaltracker.com
Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration around a shared, prioritized backlog.
- cookin'/relaxin': A guide to building prototypes cookinrelaxin.com
This.
- Agile Testing: Automated deployments with Fabric - tips and tricks agiletesting.blogspot.com
All deployments need to be automated. No ad-hoc, one-off deployments allowed. If you do allow them, they can quickly snowball into an unmaintainable, unreproducible mess.
- Continuous Integration martinfowler.com
A quick [!] overview of Continuous Integration summarizing the technique and its current usage.
- Technical Debt - 10x Software Development blogs.construx.com
The reason most often cited by technical staff for avoiding debt altogether is the challenge of communicating the existence of technical debt to business staff and the challenge of helping business staff remember the implications of the technical debt that has previously been incurred. Everyone agrees that it's a good idea to incur debt late in a release cycle, but business staff can sometimes resist accounting for the time needed to pay off the debt on the next release cycle. The main issue seems to be that, unlike financial debt, technical debt is much less visible, and so people have an easier time ignoring it.
- Writing Great Unit Tests: Best and Worst Practises « Steve Sanderson’s blog blog.codeville.net
It’s overwhelmingly easy to write bad unit tests that add very little value to a project while inflating the cost of code changes astronomically.
- Bitten bitten.edgewall.org
Bitten is a Python-based framework for collecting various software metrics via continuous integration. It builds on Trac to provide an integrated web-based user interface.
- Cloud Elasticity « Timothy Fitz timothyfitz.wordpress.com
It’s time to take advantage of the cloud’s free parallelism. Most existing use cases merely map existing techniques to the cloud. Elasticity is a critical mesaurement: the time it takes to start a node up, and your minimum time commitment per node. Short lived but massively parallel tasks that were once impossible thrive in a highly elastic world. Big prediction: Clouds are going to get more elastic indefinitely; they’ll trend with Moore’s law.
- Buildbot buildbot.net
A system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure. The guilty developer can be identified and harassed without human intervention.
- Walls Come Tumbling Down presentation slides and transcript | For A Beautiful Web forabeautifulweb.com
Excellent overview of agile (small-a) process from Malarkey
- Are you doing agile or are you doing waterfall with some agile practices? at Making good software makinggoodsoftware.com
You can be doing agile without performing any of the current recommended practices and you can perform all the recommended practices and still not be agile. Lots of teams believe they are practicing agile just because they are doing standups or TDD… That’s like pretending to be a musician because you have the best instrument.
- ongoing · Test-Driven Heresy tbray.org
Here’s my thesis: As a profession, we do a lot more software maintenance than we do greenfield development. And it’s at the maintenance end where TDD really pays off. I’m starting to see lapses from the TDD credo as more and more forgivable the closer you are to the beginning of a project. And conversely, entirely abhorrent while in maintenance mode.
- hudson: an extensible continuous integration engine hudson.dev.java.net
Extensible continuous integration engine
- Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps - O'Reilly Radar radar.oreilly.com
More on continuous deployment.
- Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day. « Timothy Fitz timothyfitz.wordpress.com
"The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass deploy to the cluster. If the deploy succeeds, repeat." Blimey.
- TeamCity :: Powerful Continuous Integration Server jetbrains.com
A powerful build management and continuous integration server supporting both Java and .NET teams.