Tag: agile

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Development

Up north: the community is booming

My old boss for a summer internship has a good listing of what goes on in Oslo, Norway and the programming community. We acutally have the largest XP-meetup in the world, and rank 1st and 3rd (XP and Lean) on the agile-meetups as well. Being able to listen to and talk to people like Alistair Cockburn, Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Sutherland and Mike Cohn that bring years of experience into the game of agile is really inspiring and helpful. A lot of people attend these meetings on a regular basis, and bring the ideas back with them into their company and projects. Many of these speakers are here courtesy of Programutvikling, which also holds some excellent courses with the speakers.

I feel privileged to have such and active community, and also a lot of bright locals to learn from. I just have to find the time to attend everything. 😉

If you’re in Oslo and interested in the programming community check the many groups, it is likely that something is going on right now.

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Development

GUTs and BUTs

Alright, so it’s a cheap one, but I had to do it. 😉 Alistair Cockburn coined the term GUTs – Good Unit Tests in a blog entry. Having a term for it was a bit of an eye opener.

I do TDD, but it’s not always the way I do stuff so I’m not religious about it. But wether I write the tests first or after, what I really strive to achieve is Good Unit Tests. TDD is a technique to make it easier to achieve GUTs, but it is no guarantee. What other techniques is there?

GUTs isn’t easy to achieve wether you write them before or after (thus I really have too many BUTs too), but that is what my system needs to be agile and avoid resisting change.

Categories
Development

Automate it all

When doing Agile development identifying and eliminating waste is a important practice. There is many things to eliminate, but one of the usual remedies is to automate a manual and error prone task. In my experience it is worth spending a lot of time automating tasks, not just because it saves time but because it gives you predictability.

Taking automation and predictability all the way would probably lead you to something like Continious Production that Paul Duvall has a post on. Johannes Brodwall also has some good perspectives on something similar.

It is sort of the holy grail of agile development, and would be something like what Jeff Sutherland said the are doing at Patientkeeper. They have deploy at the push of a button that enables them to deploy new versions to all their customers on a regular basis.

Spend time automating people. 🙂