Getting Agile

Talk about a loaded term. Even the term itself, “architecture”, when used in the Agile community can start a heated discussion. When I was coordinator of the International Association of Software Architects Puget Sound chapter, the discussions about “what is architecture” caused passionate debate. I am sure this entry will get some interesting comments, as [...]

I’d like to invite you to join me at …
SD West 2009 Conference & Expo
March 9–13
Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA
http://www.SDExpo.com/
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be teaching the following session at SD West 2009:
“Managing Software Debt: Continuing to Deliver High Value as Systems Age” on Friday, March 13th from 3:30-5:00pm
SD West is where [...]

The thought of less documentation is appealing to many in the software industry. Reducing the specificity of our requirements can have tremendous value but some go too far. One of the big myths about Agile software development is that Agile means no more documentation. This was not the purpose of the Agile Manifesto value “Working [...]

George Dinwiddie, a wonderful blogger on Agile software development, wrote on “Working Hard? Or Hardly Working?”. Please read his blog and then you can read my comment below:
Good day George,
I read your blog all the time and enjoy what you write about. This blog entry caught my attention and I had to respond.
The one problem [...]

In a Certified ScrumMaster course this week one of the teams created some haiku on the topic of user stories. Here is what they came up with:
INVEST your time in telling stories that give you meaning moving on…
Unique perspective inward and outward focused simply understood
The user wishes to do something on the site they do [...]

On November 6th I presented an updated version of the Managing Software Debt talk at Agile Vancouver “Much Ado About Agile” conference. This is a link to the presentation deck:
Managing Software Debt - Agile Vancouver (PDF)
I was honored to present at this local conference and had a great time meeting up with old friends and [...]

Managing Software Debt
Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age
Many software developers have to deal with legacy code at some point during their careers. Seemingly simple changes are turned into frustrating endeavors. Code that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. Test scripts and requirements are lacking, and at the same time are out of [...]

In the past I have blogged on software debt in terms of:

Going beyond code to manage software debt in “Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Do Your Share”
Problem with catching up on software debt in “The IT Manager’s Dilemma with Software Debt”

Although there are reasons defined or implied in those blog entries I think it is [...]

Refactoring is an essential practice for teams developing solid software and continually evolving the design to meet new customer needs. From the home page managed by Martin Fowler, who wrote the original book on refactoring, it says:
“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its [...]

From time to time I speak with a team member, ScrumMaster, functional manager, or Product Owner that asks how do we handle maintenance tasks. After we get past the obvious question “why do you have a problem with maintenance tasks?” we discuss team configurations to handle their current maintenance pains.
Traditional methods of managing maintenance tasks [...]