A severe case of coders block

With an impossible deadline on my back and a tangle of excel spreadsheets as my spec, I punch the keyboard, but the juice fails to flow in the IDE. The first test says nothing about the problem I am solving. The coffee is insipid; the Ipod sounds like a broken digital record…perhaps the copy and paste coders are on to something…but I let that thought pass. Why bother with reuse if they refuse to use my API. Do I detect NIH?

Making a case for dogmatic Extreme Programming

Refactoring is now a common term in the developer’s vocabulary. However what most developers call refactoring is really hacking. Making a change to the code in the hope that it will work is somewhat analogous to smoking a cigarette whilst filling up your petrol tank. Both will inevitably end in tears. And this is where the dogma kicks in; it is not really refactoring unless you have a safety net of automated tests to verify that the state of the universe has not changed since you  last updated that pesky connection string. A bad test is better than no test at all. I guess that leads on to my next topic…false positives and false negatives. But for now get testing and buy a diesel.

Ok Mr. Customer…your software is late what are you gonna do now?

How do projects get late? Well as Brooks says in the seminal Mythical Man Month, “projects get late one day at a time”. That day the developers spent listening to that lousy presentation or fixing their development environments instead of delivering features, the project was getting late. That day the developers spent time chasing requirements because the product owner could not be bothered, the project was getting late. Kind of reminds me of the boiled frog metaphor.

Scrum and daily releases mitigate this risk, but the can only succeed in an enabling context.

No guts no glory…

Many enterprises pay lip service to agile. They wax lyrical about agility, but the minute one practices the principles that espouse agility, they run for cover in the command and control cave. This cavern contains the usual paraphernalia of document heavy processes, bottled-necked decision throughput and the waterfall methodology. Funny really, but not surprising as some corporate types are quick to latch on to the latest buzzwords without understanding the true essence of the discipline.

As they say…”talk is cheap”. The agile acid test has got to be: ”if it talks like agile;walks like agile and smells like agile then it is agile. A form of agile duck-typing if ever there was such a thing.