Getting Agile

It has been a while since I have blogged. I apologize and have plenty of good excuses (if there are such things) about why (book, traveling, family time, etc…). I am now back and will be blogging on a more frequent basis in the next few months.

My first blog entry back is about the upcoming Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) that is happening from October 26-28 in Portland, OR. This conference was highly recommended to me by many people. This year I am fortunate enough to attend, have a paper published for the event, and presenting the paper for 45 minutes during the conference. Here are the details for my paper and presentation:

P-30 Managing Software Debt

Chris Sterling, SolutionsIQ

Many software developers will have to deal with legacy code at some point during their careers. Seemingly simple changes are turned into frustrating endeavors with code that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. Test scripts and requirements are lacking, and at the same time are out of sync with the existing system. The build is cryptic, minimally sufficient, and difficult to successfully configure and execute. It is almost impossible to find the proper place to make a requested change without breaking unexpected portions of the application. The people who originally worked on the application are long gone.

How did the software get like this? It is almost certain the people who developed this application did not intend to create such a mess. This paper presentation will highlight ways teams can work with stakeholders to manage software debt over the delivery life cycle of the product.

I hope that I am able to see others at this event. If you are interested in attending and would like to get a $50 off the normal conference attendance fee, enter the promotion code “FOA - Chris Sterling” when registering. You can register at the PNSQC web site (http://www.pnsqc.org/2009-conference/registration-information). See you there!