Archives » Process

Team Work

Software development is a team sport. Places can try to hide that fact with cubicles and individual assignments, but the fact remains that putting a system together takes a diverse group of people to pull it off: managers, developers, users, testers, writers, the list of roles goes on. But how often is thought put into […]

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Ode to Solution Based Modeling

While googling around recently, curious to know of any news of an old friend and methodologist, Jeff Alger, I came across a recent blog post on his methodology, Solution Based Modeling (SBM), and the book that details it, Developing Object Oriented Software For The Macintosh. [Note: while the book is out of print, there is […]

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Need class diagrams? No excuse now.

If there’s one thing that programmers dislike more than writing documentation of their code, it’s creating diagrams of their code. For Java developers, the Javadoc tool was a huge step forward, letting you create up-to-date browsable documentation in a heartbeat. Now you can do the same thing with UML thanks to the good folks who […]

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Evolvability

A blog post by Dan North has some great bits on agile software processes, using the analogy of evolution.
the various flavours of agile development, such as XP, Crystal, Scrum, Lean and DSDM, are all trying to solve the same problem, … they are trying to make software delivery evolvable. This ensures that delivery isn’t wrong-footed […]

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Scaling Agility

Can you get an elephant to dance? Large software teams usually have so much friction with them, thanks to all of the communication channels (or lack thereof) and internal integration to manage that it’s been a good dodge for managers or organizations who don’t want to think about agile processes. “That stuff has only been […]

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Cargo cult software

An interesting metaphor for doing process for process sake, Ned Batchelder writes about a couple of cases of cargo cult software engineering. Instead of using a process as a means to a higher goal, you think that the process is the higher goal. This has been the gripe about Big Methodologies as long as they’ve […]

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Pragmatism Spreads

Continuing to build off the appeal of a “pragmatic” approach to software development that emphasises the craft of software rather than the academic or theoretic approaches, the pragmatic duo have a new collection of books out that they call The Pragmatic Starter Kit. Their ideas are refreshing reminders of why we do this silly thing […]

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