At Agile 2008 James Surowiecki, the author of Wisdom of Crowds, gave the opening keynote address. If you have an opportunity to hear him speak, take it. He did a great job. No power point slides with a compelling style and message. (more…)
Should a team use story points or ideal days for estimation. Story points have clear advantages.
An ideal day is this thing that never happens. You get to work, everyone else took the day off, except when you need to ask them a question, then the needed person is immediately available and willing to help you. On this ideal day your goals are clear and so is your head. So really, there is no such thing as an ideal day except in our imagination. (more…)
Test Driven Development is a challenging practice. Why should you bother to learn it? You should learn it because it is a productive and predictable way to develop software.
Let’s compare TDD to the most popular way of programming, something I call Debug Later Programming. In DLP, code is considered “done” after it is designed and written. After the code is “done” it is debugged. Hmmm. Interesting definition of done isn’t it? The definition fails to include about half the effort.