James Uther wrote “I’ll make this short. Defining Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) is dangerous. That’s the tweet.”
Dickon Reed wrote “It’s now table stakes for team software development to be done on feature branches and reviewed using a tool such as github’s pull requests. That’s despite, in many situations, a lot of delay while unreviewed code piles up. If you don’t use feature branches on a project, people are puzzled and get uncomfortable. On a…”
Luke Richardson wrote “I recently read the first chapter of the 20th anniversary version of the well known software development handbook: The Pragmatic Programmer. Since this, I have had a good amount of time to reflect and observe the principles in action so I decided to write a brief summary and some of my thoughts and attitudes towards working after reading it. ”
Tom Parker-Shemilt wrote “Long time readers will note this post as being similarly clickbait as my earlier ‘How to be a Rockstar developer!‘. Don’t worry, hopefully there’s useful information here. (I’ve been inspired here by Keavy McKinn’s post ‘Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path’, which talks about many good things, but a lot of is about how to…”
Tim Band wrote “I remember a quote from John Z Delorean, creator of the iconic Delorean car as seen in the Back to the Future movies. With his backers breathing down his neck to produce his ambitious car in just a few months, he asked legendary Lotus designer Colin Chapman whether he could do it. Chapman asked him…”
Tim Band wrote “Here’s an article from Bertil Muth on freeCodeCamp on why Agile isn’t working at your company. This contains a lot of great, level-headed advice about how to excel at Agile—by which Bertil seems to mean ‘Scrum’. The assumption seems to be that Agile (which equals Scrum) is great for everyone! But is it? Might Agile…”
James Uther wrote “A little while ago we were asked if we could do a talk on ‘developer experience’ at QCon. I volunteered. We were having lots of fun at the time building a CI/CD system out of Jenkins and Kubernetes, and using a bunch of hipster languages in the project and I thought I would be pulling…”
Ian Rogers wrote “I hope we can agree that ad hominem attacks in discussion are undesirable, but I’ll suggest that platitudes can sometimes be the other side of the same coin, it’s rebuke being delivered in a wrapper of inoffensiveness. “A remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be…”
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Ian Rogers wrote “Adverse events happen – a website breaks down, a project doesn’t get delivered on time – and a proposed technique to find ‘the root cause’ is to ask the “5 Whys”. Attributed to Sakichi Toyoda in the 1930’s and adopted by Toyota and other formal techniques it’s basically the technique of listing a fault and then asking…”
Ian Rogers wrote “On the one hand it’s become a bit of a cliché to say that Waterfall doesn’t work (in fact ‘waterfall’ may never have existed), but we know that rigid projects don’t deliver—when the level of resources is the only contingency in a project then budget overrun and missed deadlines (or lowered quality) become almost inevitable.…”
Ian Rogers wrote “There are, of course, a large number of techniques described as being The Way To Do Software Engineering. I’m sure I’ve not come across them all but the ones I know about and use currently include at least: Impact mapping, Pert charts, Gantt charts, Personas, Wardley mapping, Agile, DSDM, MoSCoW, SMART, INVEST and BDD (I’ve…”
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Ian Rogers wrote “You’re somewhere in the middle of an Agile project. As usual, once you’ve actually started development, the true nature and scope of the project is becoming clear and the client asks ‘Can you do <some “clarified” feature>?’. This, of course, is a trap of linguistics. As programmers we can do anything so confidently say yes,…”
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James Uther wrote “I’m really a unix guy, but I have to admit, the whole .NET/SQLserver stack is hugely empowering. An average employee can take it, and with next to no knowledge or experience, but with a lot of determination and time, can write enough code to underpin an entire company. You start with a windows form, place…”
Mike Rowlands wrote “We’ve been making a habit of collaboration with partners for what seems like forever, so why is it that we find it hard to get the formula right with front-end designers? Are we a particularly fussy bunch, or is there something more systematic going on? Recently we’ve been working with the Agile Research Network who were…”
