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
If you’re like most people you’re under-resourced. You have many more tasks than you can handle. Your team is fully booked. And the work keeps pouring in. They ask: “What should we do first?” What should we work on first to go into the product? Bugs coming in from support calls? Maybe this cool new
I’m a big fan of Manager Tools. I’ve been listening to the podcast and recommending it to anyone, manager or not, for the last five years. A recurring topic in the podcast is Manager Tools co-founder Mark Horstman’s laws: It’s all about people More communication is better. And there are more, and I invite you
I was asked this question last Wednesday, when I led a TDD open session at the Israeli Software Craftsmanship User Group. My answer: It makes you think before you write code. In fact, next time somebody asks you what TDD stands for, you answer: Thinking-Driven Development. Sure, all the benefits are there: structured incremental progress,
It will be for me.This Wednesday, December 15th, I’m going to be a bit busy. 3pm Israel time, that’s 2pm CET, and 8am EST I’m giving a webinar about steps you can take right now toward agile. I really like to learn real world actionable stuff, and this webinar is where I’m giving back. Do
I’ve witnessed a sort of agile/lean clash incident at our standup. Reviewing our kanban board, as tasks completed, others were left on the board. Instead of completing the tasks in progress, a developer decided to pick new tasks to work on, entering them into process. The Clash Agile promotes team empowerment. Developers are encouraged to
Heads-up: I’ve recently started looking more closely into lean and kanban. Expect more posts like this one. Typemock is a unique company. Developers’ work is similar to our customers’ work. And so, since day one, the developers have also been doing support work. Support calls have their own life cycle. That’s why usually they are
In my last post “What’s next for Agile?”, I talked about alignment between the development team and the business, from the customer focus perspective. As I was watching “Agile is dead, long live agile” presentation by Jeff Sutherland, from Oredev 2010, I felt I needed to add something. When does agile work? According to Jeff,
Let’s take a look at the agile manifesto. It starts with: “We are uncovering better ways of developingsoftware” Next are the values. I’m not going to bother with the “right” side, which is of course the “dark side”. On the left we have: Individuals and interactions Working software Customer collaboration Responding to change All this
Yesterday I went to Agile Tour Israel. At the end of the day I was surprised, I didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much. Once again, being pessimistic saved the day! The event organizers did all they could to push agile and show it as mainstream. Cynical as I am, I was surprised to see