Are sales people and developers like oil and water? As I was reading this article I recalled Michael Feathers’ presentation at NDC about “The mistake at the heart of agile”. To recap: Agile closed the developers behind a walled garden, in order to let them produce without interruption from other sides of the organization. On
The latest “my dad is cooler than your dad” in develop-sphere, started with “The Ruby Train Goes Choo-Choo”. Soon enough many have joined the fray on both the Ruby and .Net sides, with the normal people saying: Take a rest. You are not what you program. Of course, the normal people (I’m assuming you, dear
My NDC 2011 talk in moving pictures form. Danger! Craftsmen Ahead! from Gil Zilberfeld on Vimeo.
At NDC 2011, there were a couple of presentations about the state of the agile today. Of note, were Uncle Bob Martin’s excellent “The land that Scrum forgot” (That man can give a show just by reading from index cards!) and Michael Feathers’ “The mistake at the heart of agile”. Until the videos are out,
How can something seem so right, and yet so wrong, at the same time? Easy. When the person who speaks is different than the one listening, which is usually the case, and there’s a translation problem. Consider the term “Refactor mercilessly”. I don’t recall when I first heard it, but it definitely caught my ear
The Agile Manifesto has 4 principles. In Agile 2008, Uncle Bob Martin in his keynote suggested a 5th principle: Craftsmanship over Execution (Yes, I’m 3 years late for the party, but bear with me. This came to me as I’m preparing to my NDC talk). All principles were written by technical people who emphasized communication
As part of my ADC experience, I enjoyed being part of Gojko Adzic’s session: The Specification Game. The room was divided to groups of four – there were 6 teams. Each group included a product owner, developers and testers. Gojko and his team were the customers. They rolled out a product they needed: a Black
It’s been a few weeks now, for my tenure as product manager at Typemock. Time for a review. What did I learn of becoming the product owner in an agile company? Get yourself a good coach. That may be true for every profession, but especially for the newly initiated, it’s a blessing if you can
In my last post, I warned against the dangers of the craftsmanship movement to itself. The main premise behind this warning is that business and developers don’t speak the same language. And since business has the upper hand, role power, money – business always wins. Martin Fowler’s post, Craftsmanship and the Crevasse, looks at the
The first thought I had, reading about the Skype meltdown last week is: here’s another opportunity to score points for unit testing. Nothing like a a single bug causing so much havoc (or silence, in this case) to get developers attention to the catastrophes waiting to happen. But I decided to go deeper. There are