How much damage can we do by misusing metrics? Quite a lot. And this time, we’re not talking about a multi-million dollar project, that’s peanuts. How about setting the education system of an entire country on a multi-year track to failure? Last week, the Israeli government finally changed a policy of rating the schools in
How do I know? Well, it seems people try agile, and it doesn’t work for them. You can take a couple of examples from Ben Linders’ post on InfoQ: “The Flexibility of Agile: Flaw or Strength?” The first example explains that agile doesn’t differentiate between large and small tasks, just by importance. This is completely
When is a problem not a problem? When there is a solution When there seems to be a solution. If a problem wasn’t solved, we’d see all kinds of talks around it, ideas of solutions, discussions (wars) about different possible resolutions. Once we have a solution, bingo! The problem went away. If you apply Cynefin
In a recent webinar I did about unit testing, I was asked if MSTest is a good framework to support scrum. Being, well, myself I started with “It’s the wrong question”. Obviously a test framework support any process or methodology. Specifically, a team implementing scrum, that doesn’t have any technical practices, can benefit from test
At DevCon TLV I gave this presentation about code coverage, and how we can use, and misuse it. Here are the slides. You can still catch it in webinar form in a week’s time on the Typemock channel.
“What gets measured, gets done”. We all know this. By the way, did you notice that it says: “done”, not “done well”? We like metrics, because we base decisions on them. If we didn’t have them, then we would just be guessing. Yet sometimes, metrics deceive us. Well not exactly, it’s our interpretation of them
I’ve recently watched a session called “Chasing the golden GOOS”. From the cunning name, you probably get that it’s about developing an app using the “Growing Object Oriented Systems Guided by Tests” approach. The whole thing was interesting, and then there was a question in the end. Someone in the audience asked about the ratio
My new article on Agile Connection is live. It’s about co-location, which is a basic agile premise. And how it can be broken and mended very easily. Read it here.
Here are the slides from my Sela Developer Practices 2013 talk: PS: If you were not one of the thousands in attendance, I’m doing it as a Typemock webinar, Thursday May 9th. Register here.
Tomorrow I’ve got a full day. In the morning, I’m giving a talk at the Sela Developer Practice. This is going to be about “7 steps to writing your first unit test”. Following that, I’m going to hang out at the Typemock booth at Agile Israel 2013. If you’re there, come and say hi. If