Thursday 21 February 2013

Reasons to come to Agile Dev Practices




Program Overview

  1. I'll be there.
  2. Good mix of sessions.
  3. Good mix of tutorials.
  4. Good range of subjects.
  5. Did I mention I'll be there?
  6. Good range of workshops.
  7. My colleague Ant will be there.
  8. 25% off with code ATDC4P_025.
  9. Potsdam/Berlin is great.
  10. Markus can sign 'ATDD by Example: A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development' for you.  
  11. You can talk to Gaspar Nagay, main contributor of the open-source .NET BDD tool, SpecFlow
  12. Ellen can sign one of her books for you.
  13. You can talk to Chris Matts and Olav Masssen.
  14. Díaz & Hilterscheid have put on a great event.
  15. You can talk to people who make software from all over the world, share your stories. 
  16. You can teach.
  17. You can learn. 

There are more reasons, what am I missing?

Wednesday 6 February 2013

It doesn't make sense.


I stole this, I changed two words:

People work with one set of ideas about how the software is. Everything they do, be it experimental or theoretical work, is informed by, and framed within, that set of ideas. There will be some evidence that doesn't fit, however. At first, that evidence will be ignored or sabotaged. Eventually, though, the anomalies will pile up so high they simply cannot be ignored or sabotaged any longer. Then comes crisis.
13 Things That Don't Make Sense - Michael Brooks.

To me, this is a pretty good explanation of software development, although of course, not in all cases of software development.

It's also a pretty good reason why things like agile, devops, devs, bdd, etc have come about.

We do approach things with a set of ideas and we do frame things with that set of ideas in mind.

We stick to our own ideas, even though some of our ideas have been born out of others' ideas and thoughts and words and we've blindly made them our ideas and thoughts.
- For more on this train of thought refer to Leprechauns of Software Development or various kinds of certification.

When we have ideas that we have actually conceived it can be a good thing because we all have different experiences, we all have different thoughts, we can all add something.

I think the problems occur when we don't let go of theses ideas (when beneficial) and learn from others experiences and listen to others ideas.

A lot of time we don't conceive ideas together for something we are supposed to be working on together.

What's wrong with us?

Doesn't make sense to me.

Make sense to you?

Continuing with the excerpts from 13 Things That Don't Make Sense The next paragraph starts with the sentence:

Crisis, Kuhn said, is soon followed by the paradigm shift in which everyone gains a radically new way of looking at the world.

Does it? Not for software development, not as much as needed.

In the context of software development the sentence would read:

Crisis, Kuhn said, is soon followed by a attempt to throw more people at, work longer hours to stem and follow the procedures that caused the crisis in the first place until the next crisis arrives.

What's wrong with us?