Debate sprang up at JAOO '07 around Bob Martin's assertion that "nowadays it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, he debated with Jim Coplien on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
Kanban workshops, courses and conferences are springing up, and practicing Agilists are investigating what this method, adapted from Lean, offers their teams. Attractive benefits are cited, from revealing bottlenecks to happy teams experiencing more "flow". But thought leaders warn that Kanban's laid back approach is "kryptonite" to Scrum's call to resolve impediments immediately.
Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.
Can refactoring and unit testing really create robust “working software” that survives the real world? In this story adapted from his book Release It! Michael Nygard contends that "abstractions leak": we need to attend to architecture, even in Agile projects, to guard ourselves against the 5AM failures that occur when foundational abstractions misbehave.
John Harby is a participant in several OASIS Technical Committees and was co-author of The Middleware Company SOA Blueprints initiative. He is an independent consultant on SOA and middleware in Enterprise scale projects. John writes about problems with the ESB pattern including vendor lock-in, centralization and feature overkill. In this article, John proposes an alternative capability.
Use of Agile methodologies is growing, but this comes with its own challenges: including the possibility of dilution as teams copy practices rather than growing them, implementing them without understanding. Perhaps it's time to talk about how failure to teach the basics puts much at risk: the integrity and engagement of team members, and the trust of their customers.
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
Zed Shaw and Matt Pelletier sat down with InfoQ's Obie Fernandez at RailsConf to explore some of the reasoning behind setting up the mongrel project, getting adoption in enterprise and dealing with developers who just aren't ready. Watch the interview to find out how much Shaw's Enterprise Mongrel product will cost, where the support contracts are and who'll come out on top when the vultures land.
