Author Archives: davef

Autonomy != Anarchy

Posted on August 30, 2019 by davef

I am a long-standing believer in the principles of Agile development. I have been working this way for several decades, before it was referred to as “Agile”. I am friends with several signatories to the original “Agile Manifesto” and with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Science and Software Development

Posted on March 4, 2019 by davef

I have been talking about Continuous Delivery being, informally, an application of the scientific method to software development for several years now. I have spoken about it, CD, being a candidate for the beginnings of a genuine engineering discipline for … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Effective Practices, Engineering Discipline, Software Engineering | Tagged | Leave a comment

Hygiene Factors for Software Development

Posted on February 12, 2019 by davef

I got into a small debate about software development with someone recently via the comments section to a previous blog-post. During the course of the debate I thought of an analogy to make part of my argument, but I think … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Culture, Effective Practices, Engineering Discipline, Software Engineering | 1 Comment

Perceived Barriers to Trunk Based Development

Posted on November 26, 2018 by davef

A friend of mine has recently started work at a new company. She asked me if I’d answer a few questions from their dev team, so here is the second… Q: “Currently at MarketInvoice we use short-lived feature branches that … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Culture, Effective Practices, Feature Branching, Pair Programming, TDD | 3 Comments

Pair Programming for Introverts

Posted on November 22, 2018 by davef

A friend of mine has recently started work at a new company. She asked me if I’d answer a few questions from their dev team, so here is the first in a short series of their questions and my answers… … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Culture, Effective Practices, Pair Programming | 1 Comment

CI and the Change Log

Posted on September 11, 2018 by davef

I get in to debates about the relative merits of “Continuous Integration (and Delivery)” vs those of “Feature Branching”  on a fairly regular basis. A common push-back against CI, from the feature-branchers, is “you can’t maintain a clean change-log”. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Effective Practices, Feature Branching | 5 Comments

Three Distinct Mind-sets in TDD

Posted on June 27, 2018 by davef

I have blogged about TDD before. I think that it is one of the most important tools in improving the design of our software, as well as increasing the quality of the systems that we create. TDD provides valuable, fine-grained … Continue reading →

Posted in Continuous Integration, Effective Practices, Software Design, TDD | 10 Comments

A Few Thoughts on Feature Flags

Posted on April 9, 2018 by davef

I confess that “Feature Flags” make me a bit nervous. Despite this I think them a useful and important tool in our ability to achieve Continuous Integration. So why do they make me nervous? Well, they are a form of … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Integration, Effective Practices | 7 Comments

Continuous Integration and Feature Branching

Posted on March 30, 2018 by davef

Recently I spoke at the Pipeline Conference in London. I gave a talk on “Optimising Continuous Delivery” to a bunch of people who were self-selected as interested in Continuous Delivery, most of them would already consider themselves CD practitioners, Pipeline … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Effective Practices, Feature Branching | 76 Comments

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 →

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