Category Archives: Culture

Women in Computing

Posted on March 7, 2021 by davef

March 8th is International Women’s Day, which got me thinking again about why we have so few women programmers (well, in Europe and the USA anyway). Things didn’t start out this way. Many of the first programmers and pioneers of computing were … Continue reading →

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Is SAFe safe?

Posted on January 19, 2021 by davef

I recently made a passing comment in one of my videos about SAFe, it was a bit of a cheap-shot on my part if I am honest and I got picked-up on it, appropriately, by a viewer. It is too … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Culture, Effective Practices | Tagged , , , | 7 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

Diversity

Posted on January 24, 2017 by davef

I inadvertently found myself in the middle of a minor Twitter storm on the topic of diversity. The organisers of a conference that I attended made some, to me, intemperate remarks on the subject. They were asked why there were … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture | 1 Comment

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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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

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