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system metaphor
Many thanks to Bill Caputo for bringing this article about metaphors into my range-finder! Like Bill, I use metaphors a great deal in everyday conversation, and yet I hardly ever set up a system...
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refactoring is hard
I had an experience a few months ago that yet again raised the question of what kind of skills are required to make XP work. I was trying to get a team to adopt TDD, and was having very little success....
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just do it
There’s been a thread recently on Clarke Ching‘s SellingAgile list about selling agile to developers. My approach has always been to ‘just do it’ and lead by example. Here’s the story I told on the...
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selling agile
The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that selling agile at all is a mistake. Certainly as a coach/manager, what interests me most is the ‘process’ side of things, and agile is always...
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an XP game in manchester
I’m really excited: I’ve heard a great deal of praise for the XP Game, and now our local agile group is going to run one! It’s in Manchester on October 13th – see...
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xp game in manchester
The AgileNorth group helped run an XP Game last night in Manchester. The event was organised jointly by ourselves and the good folks at Exoftware, on behalf of the Agile Alliance Europe programme....
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selling agile is not about programming techniques
We welcomed a couple of new faces to last night’s meeting of the AgileNorth group. Interestingly, both Josh and David want to get their work environments moving over to being agile, without either...
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hitting the high notes
In Hitting the High Notes Joel Spolsky makes a compelling argument in favour of hiring only the best programmers. I agree with his conclusion, if not with his supporting arguments. Joel presents tables...
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eXXXtreeme programming
The Extreme Programming page on uncyclopaedia made me laugh out loud. (Particularly the laptops in the photos.) Sad how so much of it rings true though… (Thanks to John for sharing the link.)
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TOC and YAGNI
My apologies if this has been said or written a thousand times before: YAGNI is XP’s way of exploiting the constraint. Which means that XP, and hence most agile methods, are set up on the assumption...
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why YAGNI acts to EXPLOIT the bottleneck
Clarke asked me to explain my earlier throw-away remark that YAGNI forms part of the EXPLOIT step in moving the bottleneck away from development, so here goes… YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It) is an...
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iteration zero podcast
A couple of weeks ago Clarke Ching interviewed me as part of his Everyday Agile initiative. The discussion describes what happened when one of my clients, Codeweavers, invited me to participate in...
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communicating intent is all about names
Ths ten-minute video chat between Corey Haines and J.B.Rainsberger introduced a nice simplification of eXtremeNormalForm. In the discussion, JB hardens up the wishy-washy Communicates Intent value by...
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fun and games at xp-manchester
Last night was the October 2010 meeting of XP-Manchester, a local group set up by me and Jim McDonald. As always the meeting consisted of two halves, the first being a workshop (this time led by me)...
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Estimating user stories: the 5 day challenge
This is a quick note about an idea I’ve been using with a few software teams during the last couple of years. I also spoke about it briefly at the Scottish Ruby Conference this week. If you try it,...
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Where is the constraint in software development?
I just had a thought about the relationship between software development and the Theory of Constraints. It probably isn’t a new thought, although it seems to differ from some of the analyses I’ve seen...
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Evolving the kanban board
My wife and I are planning to move house. We aren’t sure where we want to move to, or indeed how much we have to spend. Naturally, though, we want to get the highest possible selling price for our...
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