malvasia bianca

I wasn’t expecting to like How Buildings Learn nearly as much as I did. I learned about it from the XP book‘s bibliography, and certainly you wouldn’t have to look very far in the book to find inspiration for your programming. But I was surprised at how interested I was in the actual topic of […]

Driven by my recent mania for all thing lean, I just finished Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck; I wish I’d read it a few years ago. I’d been aware of it for some time, but I passed it over when doing my initial tour of the agile literature. I had assumed that […]

I was thinking about ways in which production might be building up between stages of pipelines that I’m involved in, and I realized: I have forty or so books sitting on my “recently”-bought-but-not-yet-read shelf. That’s several months of inventory – probably well over half a year, actually, given my depressingly low current reading rate and […]

I’ve been really curious about lean manufacturing (which basically means the way Toyota does things) for a couple of months now. I was aware that people had made some analogies between it and agile software development, but my interest got more concrete when I started reading Silk and Spinach: that’s a blog that spends a […]

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post: the reason why my boss was so concerned about integration testing was because of customer feedback. Which is a perfect example of why customer representatives should be involved in writing tests (instead of, say, just handing off requirements and leaving it up to the engineering […]

We had a (very useful) meeting at work today which, at one point, turned to the extent to which our end-to-end tests should extend beyond the software that we are writing and actually invoke our software via our partners’ software. (As opposed to driving our external interfaces through test clients that we’ve written ourselves.) My […]

Cleaning out my list of saved links: A visit to the Ghibli museum. Lean manufacturing books are next up on my reading list. I’m glad some Congresspeople are seeing the DRM light… Because the bad guys aren’t about to let up. I repeat: the bad guys aren’t about to let up. Google’s hardly a saint, […]

A few months ago, I finally started appreciating the Customer role in XP: it made a real difference to us when we stopped doing our iteration planning ourselves (with advice from others, to be sure), and started having somebody else pick the stories for each release. (We still plan the work in our weekly iterations […]

As a manager who is drawn to XP, one question that reading First, Break All the Rules raises is: how compatible are agile methods with the book’s recommendations? Let’s start by going through the questions. 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? This is a strength of XP (and other agile […]

I agree with Keith Ray’s endorsement of Pascal van Cauwenberghe’s “Things I Didn’t Learn” series.

I had a very pleasant lunch yesterday talking with some other people at Sun about XP. At some point, the conversation turned to “superstar programmers” who do their best not to help other people, giving perfunctory answers to questions, sending various signals that they don’t want to be bothered, and even being actively insulting to […]

Acceptance testing has not been one of my fortes. Honestly, it took me a long time to be convinced by it – why isn’t unit testing alone enough? I’ve been caught out enough times by acceptance tests which I put off writing and which, when written, turned up bugs, that now I’m pretty religious about […]

I e-mailed the author of the blog I mentioned recently, and he was kind enough to put together a lean manufacturing reading list.

Various mentions I’ve seen recently make me think I should learn more about lean manufacturing. An interesting quote: Kaizen activities in lean manufacturing often begin with red-tagging, in which all superfluous inventory, tools and rubbish are marked with a red tag and moved into one corner. At the end of a week, if any tagged […]

The last section of The Fifth Book of Peace talks about Thich Nhan Hanh a lot, so I decided to read one of his books next. One of his big themes is “mindful behavior”; as I understand it, this means that, when you do something, you should simply be doing that, not thinking about or […]

At our weekly meeting today, my team members had some interesting comments on what had gone wrong over the last week. Among other things, we had planned to work on two 2-point cards; we break up cards that are larger than that, and in the past even cards that size have been problematic. In this […]

One of the most interesting entries for me on the Agile Toolkit podcast is the one on promiscuous pairing and the least qualified implementor. What the interviewee proposes is that, when starting on a card, the person who knows the least about it should work on the card, pairing with somebody who knows more about […]

A week ago, we finally finished all the cards that we’d planned for the week. I am hugely embarrassed that it’s taken so long, given that we’ve been trying to do the planning game for about ten months. But we’d been getting it pretty seriously wrong for a long time – reading through that post, […]

Martin Fowler just revised his The New Methodology paper; it’s a nice introductory exposition/justification of agile methods.

As I said last month, we’ve finally started doing a full planning game; we did it again this month. And I’m really glad we did: for one thing, November’s planning rubbed in our faces some of the things we were doing wrong. One basic issue, as I see it, was that we were focusing too […]