Category Archives: Agile Development

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 →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Effective Practices, External Post | Leave a comment

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 | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in Acceptance Testing, Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, LMAX, TDD | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Acceptance Testing, Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, TDD | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Software Architecture, Software Design | Leave a comment

Is Continuous Delivery Riskier?

Posted on March 18, 2015 by davef

I read an article in CIO magazine today “Three Views on Continuous Delivery“. Of course the idea of such an article is to present differing viewpoints, and I have no need, or even desire, for the world to see everything … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, DevOps | Leave a comment

Incremental Design – Part I

Posted on March 4, 2015 by davef

Continuous Delivery is all about making small changes. Work flows more easily, planning is simpler, error detection is helped and the time from idea to value is reduced when we make changes in small increments, but how do you solve … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Software Architecture, Software Design | Leave a comment

Cargo-cult DevOps

Posted on December 15, 2014 by davef

My next blog post in the XebiaLabs “CD Master Series” is now available. DevOps is a very successful meme in our industry. Most organisations these days seem to be saying that they aspire to it, though they don’t necessarily know … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, DevOps | Leave a comment

What does “good” look like?

Posted on September 16, 2014 by davef

The nice folks at XebiaLabs have asked me to do a few guest blog posts on their site. My first post is called “What does ‘Good’ look like?” “I think that we have a problem in the software development industry. … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, External Post | Leave a comment