Software Best Practices

I'm going on some long needed (and hard earned) vacation. I won't be blogging again for about one month (so this will likely be my only entry for July). I've got a lot of REALLY GREAT and interesting books to try and catch up on. I hope to blog about them when I return. Here is what's...

Some of you may be aware of Kent Beck's Four Rules of Simple Code that state simple code: Correctly runs (and passes) all the tests Contains no duplication ( OnceAndOnlyOnce and The DRY Principle ) Clearly expresses all the ideas/intentions we needed to express (reveals all intent and intends all...

Agile literature focuses on the benefits Agile provides to developers and development teams, with a secondary focus on the benefits Agile provides customers. Much of the Agile literature also asserts that Agile practices are more responsive to business needs. Many businesses are embracing Agile and seeing...

The agile community has written much about this in the past year or so: Iterative vs Incremental - from the first (and original) Wiki Web The Neglected Practice of Iteratation - by Jeff Patton Difference between Iterative and Incremental Development - nice visual depiction No Waterfall Trap -- an even...

InfoQ.com summarized an email-list discussion thread on the subject of using a Traceability Matrix in an Agile Project . I contributed quite a lot to the thread, and InfoQ apparently included many of the key things I said along with the related URLs to articles I've written. (Thanks guys!)

Some of the discussion with my co-authors on our May 2008 CM Journal article on Agile Release Management spurred some additional thoughts by me that I hope to refine and work into a subsequent article later this year. Release Management is about so much more than just the code/codeline (and it being...

My Agile SCM co-authors Rob Cowham, Steve Berczuk, and myself have written an article for the May CM Journal on An Agile Approach to Release Management We're relatively pleased with the article, and all collaborated together quite well.

My review of Jim Brosseau's Software Teamwork: Taking Ownership for Success is available in the May issue of the Agile Journal . It is nothing less than outstanding! I found Software Teamwork to be an immensely helpful, intensely practical, profusely insightful field guide to improving team outcomes...

I recently learned that Michelle Sliger , author of the wonderful 4 part series of articles on Relating PMBoK to Agile Practices , is co-authoring a book with Stacia Broderick entitled the Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility . You can even download an excerpt from her website. I'm looking...

Daniel, The estimate will be affected by the technology stack (to some degree) and even more by the kind of software that's being built. It's possible to be able to make much better predictions about large scale systems than your comment suggests. It's a significant amount of work and requires...