Don’t try to follow the waterfall model. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no waterfall. Waterfall In Practice Today I often see people discuss, argue and debate the best approach or type of approach to software development. Most commonly, this involves a discussion of the merits of iterative and/or agile…
The Ben Franklin Effect Have you ever started looking for something, let’s say your wallet, and been fairly certain that it wasn’t in your house? You started looking in all of the most likely places and progressed with increasing glumness to less and less likely landing spots. Perhaps you eventually wound up in the crawl…
An Extraordinary Claim I was talking to a friend the other day, and he relayed a conversation that he’d had with a co-worker. They were discussing writing unit tests and the co-worker claimed that he writes unit tests regularly, but discards them and never checks them into source control. I was incredulous at this, so…
Micro-Scrum A week or two ago, I read Stephen Walther’s blog post “Scrum in 5 Minutes” and reading his description of the backlog reminded me of a practice that I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of lately. My practice, inspired by Kent Beck in his book Test Driven Development By Example, is to…
Many moons ago in my first role as a developer, I had very little real work to do for the first month or so on the job, so I occupied myself with poking around the company intranet, jotting down acronyms, figuring out who was responsible for what, and documenting all of this in spreadsheets and…
