Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

One set of problems I have often seen with “the Waterfall” are the Communications Problems, particularly the over-reliance on communication by documents. 

Communication-By-Documentation (CBD) – What’s so bad about that?

It seems so correct and natural to use documents to capture and communicate all the details of what we are working on that it is almost unthinkable to question this practice.  But I am going to try.

The sort of documentation I am discussing here are requirement docs, graphs, ER diagrams, models of all sorts, analysis docs, architectural diagrams, and etc.  (There is a lot of etc., by the way. )  I am not saying that documentation is not needed, or that it is not useful, it is just that we have to be careful to protect our project from the problems that these documents bring with them.   Continue reading ‘Communication Problems with the Waterfall’ »

Jason and I had a great time presenting at the XPSD last night, and meeting up with the Ruby programmers later on at the Rock Bottom in La Jolla.

As far as I could tell it went over pretty nicely, and everyone really enjoyed watching Jason coding live on his laptop where the ReSharper demo license had just expired.  He didn’t let it stop him, and it was a nice demonstration of how pitiful life can be without a good refactoring tool. 

Here are the slides from the NMock2 intro presentation givn at XPSD.org on April 3rd.

NMock2_Intro.pdf

Don’t get your hopes up too much – they are just my talking points.  I hope you find them useful.

There are a number of blog posts, books, and articles that discuss the idea of “Technical Debt” in a software project. One good (and short) article on the subject is Technical Debt at Martin Fowlers bliki. (He attributes Ward Cunningham with coining the term in 1992, so this is nothing new). I’ve also heard various presentations at conferences and developer group meetings that covered this idea as well, and I find it useful as a way to think about a harmful practice that is prevalent in software development.

Here is my attempt at a description of Technical Debt:

Technical Debt is the accumulation of bad code and design that degrades the quality of a project in such a way that it is harder to maintain, enhance, and support. (That is, the code has become more rigid, fragile, opaque, and so on – which are design smells as presented by Robert Martin in his Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices books.) Continue reading ‘Another metaphor for Technical Debt: Deferred Maintenance’ »

Jason Kerney and I are going to once again present our NMock2 Exploratory techniques presentation.   This time at the XPSD meeting on April 3rd.

See their site at XPSD.org to get the details on the group… or just read this which I just copied from their site:

Meeting Information & Location

XP San Diego meets the first Thursday of each month to informally discuss and exchange ideas. We feel we learn best from our peers, the merely curious, active practitioners, as well as experienced consultants, when they share their skills, knowledge, concerns and experiences. We encourage everyone to participate in our monthly forums and learn something new. We meet on the SAIC Corporate Campus from 6 PM to 8 PM; 10260 Campus Point Drive, a.k.a. Building C, in the fifth floor conference room. Please find parking on the street and check in with security in Building C before heading upstairs. See our mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xpsandiego/) for more information.

Here is the synopsis of our talk:

“A Little Taste of NMock2 For That Smooth, Relaxing, Unit-Testing Flavor”

We’ll explore how the NMock2 library makes it easy to remove dependencies and test behaviors in unit tests, allowing you to quickly set up tests that confirm your code does what you want it to be doing.

This code-intensive presentation covers the motivation for using Mock Objects, and once we have covered the basics, we’ll show our unbelievably effective technique for using dynamic mock objects as an exploratory discovery tool for introducing characterization tests for “legacy” code (that is, code without sufficient tests as described by Michael Feathers).

NMock2 is a free, open source dynamic mock object library for .NET that can help you isolate the target and test only the localized functionality. This is very easy to do, and you can be up and running in just a few minutes. Mock objects can give you years of trouble-free pleasure that you otherwise miss out on if you don’t come to this presentation.

I hope that you can make it, or to some future meeting of the XPSD.  I always learn a lot at the XPSD meetings – the people that show up are among the best XP/Agile folks in the country.