This one is for software developers. One of the basic ideas of agile software development is that the requesters of software have the primary responsibility to understand customer value and to explain “the What” to the people who build solutions; while the makers have the responsibility to determine “the How” when they build solutions. Yet, a chronic problem throughout the industry is that the makers allow the requesters to dictate “the How.” In particular, I’m thinking about the notion of keeping the software design clean at all times. In clarifying the widely-misunderstood idea of “technical debt,” Ward Cunningham reiterates that…

Warning: Snark alert. I read something recently – might have been on social media somewhere, but I don’t recall exactly – a story about how test-driven development (TDD) had caused a software development team to allow a defect into their product. The feature in question was a funds transfer operation. A customer could use the application to move funds from one account to another. The thing is, there’s a possibility that a customer might try to transfer funds from and to the same account. The application is not supposed to allow that. Yet, it was possible to do it in…

When it comes to software development tools, bigger is better. Apparently. Feature Bloat Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) keep growing. Some of them have so many features I don’t even know all the things they can do. The world in my window High-end IDEs can display many different panels giving various views into system configuration settings, project directory tree, project configuration settings, various “consoles” and log files, and different kinds of source and data files. All or most of these panels can be enabled/disabled and expanded/contracted, and some appear automatically whenever the IDE thinks they should and not necessarily when we…

Years ago we lived in Ohio. In our front yard there was a circular bed with a small tree in the center, surrounded by thick shrubbery. The shrubs throve, but the tree looked as if it was barely alive. We called in a tree specialist and he told us the bad news: The tree was dying and we should have it removed. We couldn’t afford to do anything about the tree just then, but we thought the circular bed would look a lot better if the tree were surrounded by flowers rather than by plain bushes. We pulled out the…

I was tempted to inject a typo in this post just for the irony.  If you find it, post in the comments. Software development is challenging. [tweetable]In an agile world, baking quality in—defect prevention—is the norm, or at least it should be.[/tweetable] Done well, this kind of development can be incredibly rewarding and the feedback loops are almost instantaneous. When teams are test driving, the world of software development simply shows up differently. [tweetable]Working, Tested Product is the primary measure of progress and the value of new functionality for changes can be recognized by customers quickly[/tweetable] Automation and quality is…