Joe Armstrong and Dave Thomas take a look back on the evolution of software and progress that has been made. They make some observations about the actual state of the industry and highlight problems that prevent it from delivering quality software. They try to identify reasons of these issues and suggest craftsmanship as possible solution.
This essay is an intentionally provocative and controversial call for a real revolution in how we conceive of and practice software development. The intent is to stimulate discussion.
"Being Agile" is a state of mind achieved when the practitioner has transcended Agile practice (phase three of agile according to Kent Beck). This presentation will show how following agile values, ideas, and practices lead the practitioner to the threshold of transcendence. We will also talk about how to take the final step: from "Doing Agile" to "Being Agile!"
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.
Mitch Harper, co-founder of BigCommerce.com, claimed in a recent issue of the Sydney Morning Herald that university education might be the wrong way to become a software engineer. According to Harper, a self-educated software engineer without an university degree: universities leave their students rather unprepared for the realities of being a software engineer.
High-performance teams constitute a mere 2% of the workforce, but Agile processes appear to stimulate the formation of these types of teams. This article discusses Steve Denning's perspective on how such teams can be nurtured in the workplace; it also looks at a recent talk by Ominlab Media's Stefan Gillard on how to select and employ for the formation of high-performance teams.
One unfortunate modern truth about software engineering university graduates is that a frightening number come out of school with little to no applicable knowledge about agile software development. A soon to be published undergraduate textbook by Orit Hazzan and Yael Dubinsky is a step towards turning this around.
James Golick and Reg Braithwaite discuss the often overlooked realities of how putting teams into "Crunch Mode" can have undesirable results. The discussion looks at various ways applying pressure to a team often results in putting your project into not better but worse shape and how teams and managers might benefit by taking a different approach.
