Category Archives: Agile Development

Answers to GOTO Cph 2017 Questions

Posted on October 2, 2017 by davef

I gave a presentation on my recommended approach to Acceptance Testing today, here at GOTO Copenhagen. You can see an earlier version of this talk, from another conference here. GOTO will be publishing their version soon 😉 I ran out … Continue reading →

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Mob Rule?

Posted on October 7, 2016 by davef

I was at a conference last year where I saw Woody Zuill talking about “Mob Programming”. You can see that talk here A very simple description of Mob programming, for those of you who don’t have time to watch Woody’s … Continue reading →

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Test *Driven* Development

Posted on June 29, 2016 by davef

Before Test Driven Development (TDD) the only thing that applied a pressure for high-quality in software development was the knowledge, experience and commitment of an individual software developer. After TDD there was something else. High quality in software is widely … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Effective Practices, Software Design, TDD | 4 Comments

Cycle-Time

Posted on June 29, 2016 by davef

Motivation is a slippery thing. My favourite example is described by the writer Dan Pink. He tells the true story of a Nursery who, like many Nurseries, had a problem with parents turning up late to collect their children. This … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Culture, Effective Practices | 2 Comments

RedGate Webinar Q&A

Posted on May 11, 2016 by davef

I recently took part in a Webinar for Database tools vendor Redgate. At the end of the Webinar we ran out of time for some of the questions that people had submitted, so this blog post provides my answers to those … Continue reading →

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Pair Programming – The Most Extreme XP Practice?

Posted on April 4, 2016 by davef

I was an early adopter of Extreme Programming (XP). I read Kent’s book when it was first released in 1999 and, though skeptical of some of the ideas, others resonated very strongly with me. I had been using something like … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Culture, Effective Practices, Pair Programming | 2 Comments

The Anatomy of an Experimental Organisation

Posted on October 2, 2015 by davef

I am a software developer. I see the world from that perspective. In reality though that is only one viewpoint. While it is important that we are effective at delivering software, what really matters is that we are effective at … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Culture | Tagged | 2 Comments

Test Maintainability

Posted on June 11, 2015 by davef

At LMAX, where I worked for a while, they have extensive, world-class, automated acceptance testing. LMAX tests every aspect of their system and this is baked in to their development process. No story is deemed complete unless all acceptance criteria … Continue reading →

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How many test failures are acceptable?

Posted on June 8, 2015 by davef

Continuous Delivery is getting a lot of mileage at the moment. It seems to be an idea whose time has come. There was a survey last year that claimed that 66% of companies had a “Strategy for Continuous Delivery”. Not … Continue reading →

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Incremental Design – Part II

Posted on April 30, 2015 by davef

In my earlier blog post on incremental design I suggested that we need to allow for failure. So how do we limit the impact of failure, how do we tell when our design choices don’t work and how do we … Continue reading →

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