Object Oriented Programming in a Nutshell
Next year I’ll likely be teaching Essential Test-Driven Development to a team that includes about 50% COBOL programmers. I told the client I’d look for…
Category: Development
Sharpen Your Knives
You’ve heard the old adage about the lumberjack who—in order to cut a tree in an hour—will take 45 minutes to sharpen the saw? This…
Good Design, part IV: The Role of Tests
We’ve seen how refactoring becomes the primary design activity on an Agile team. Diligent, confident refactoring is possible to the degree that the code is…
Good Design, Part II: Code Smells
Last month we talked about good software design and introduced the notion of code smells. Code smells are names given to those instinctual thoughts you…
Good Design
I’ve learned not to assume a team has experienced a variety of software design skills. Some are writing elegant functional-paradigm code in archaic, challenging languages.…
How TDD is More Than Simply Unit Testing
I was recently asked about the difference between unit-testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD). Specifically, why—if the end results are the same—would I recommend TDD over…
Frequently Asked Questions about Agile Technical Skills
What are the Agile Engineering Skills, Scrum Developer Practices, or Software Craftsmanship practices? These are three (of many) common names for a set of practices…
Be an Expert in a Year – Growing the Agile Way
The guys over at Expert Table Tennis had a great idea. What would it take to become an expert? Dedication? Heart? Perseverance?
Agile antipattern: Sizing or estimating bug fixes
Is the bug to the left a large bug or a small bug? It looks HUGE to me! Well, in reality it is probably between…
New to agile? Remember a user story is more than a card!
What’s wrong with the user story on the card? It seems to have everything we need: a) short title, b) a size (in this case…
New to agile? Learn how to split stories
In my last blog Agile antipattern: Taking on large stories I said I would give you some tips on how to split stories. First though, it is…
Agile antipattern: Code freezes during each iteration
Over the past 18 months I’ve encountered a number of teams where it is standard practice to have a code freeze late in the iteration. …
Agile Architecture – It is NOT an Oxymoron!
Many companies adopting agile have a hard time with the architecture and design of their large systems. They like the concept of agile, but can’t…
Many companies adopting agile have a hard time with the architecture and design of their large systems. They like the concept of agile, but can't understand how to emerge and meet architectural requirements just in time for the team to be able to proceed. They get to the point where they believe "agile architecture" is an oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp" or "deafening silence." It just doesn't make sense to them.
The good news is there is finally starting to be some good information available about agile architecture. The image on the left is one of many which can be found on the Internet when looking for information about this concept. Finally, the agile community is putting some effort into answering the question which almost always arises during an agile transformation "What about the system architecture?"
First of all, teams need to change a lot of their thinking about architecture. Instead of "how do all of these pieces and parts fit together nicely", the thought process needs to revolve around minimizing the cost of change and delivering customer value. So a good first step is thinking "how do I separate all of these pieces so change is easy" and following that up with "what value can be delivered with small pieces of the overall architecture in place?" David Bernstein has an excellent post