Dan North talks about the tendency developers-becoming-architects have to create bigger and more complex systems. Without trying to be simplistic, North argues for simplicity, offering strategies to extract the simple essence from complex situations.
"Simplicity" is a core agile tenet, particularly when it comes to software design and testing. Since 2006, Naresh Jain has been running a worldwide conference, the Simple Design & Testing Conference, for practitioners to collectively push the boundaries on the topic. Naresh tells InfoQ what's going on behind this small, but well-known conference and why he is so passionate about the topic.
Well-known agilist and TDD expert J.B. Rainsberger has begun a series of posts to explain why his experience has led him to the thought-provoking conclusion that "integration tests are a scam".
Kent Beck wrote 'First One, Then Many' to explain the application of Succession to software design. Succession is a technique for evolving the architecture of a system from 'just enough for now' to what will eventually be needed. The example given is for a system that only needs to process one transaction today, but will eventually need to process many.
Kasper Sørensen has created a new open source project at eobjects.dk called MetaModel. The project is a common domain model, query engine, and optimizer for different types of datastores, such as relational databases and flat files. MetaModel is a Java library that provides a fluent, object-oriented interface for SQL compliant queries.
It's easy to forget what originally motivated us, once we're implementing Agile. Teams spin, trying to figure out which practices to start with, unsure which will have the biggest impact, or how they fit together. Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige propose a customized adoption approach to help teams decide where to focus first - an alternative to adoption of pre-packaged methodologies.
In this interview taped at FutureRuby, Jonathan Dahl explains ways to write clear Ruby code and how to use minimalism as a guiding principle.
Ron Jeffries' upcoming book looks at how tracking "Running Tested Features" is the essential element of Agility, from which all other practices and activities necessarily follow. Deborah Hartmann interviews Ron who takes to the whiteboard to explain how, when supported by XP's "simple design" practice, RTF helps teams deliver consistently without building up costly technical debt.
