January 28, 2008 by mensming.

Feature Driven Development (FDD) is one of the agile methods I think does not get enough attention. In particular, the principles of FDD - as they impact project management -are very useful in agile and non-agile environments. The book that I used to learn about FDD is A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development by by Stephen R. Palmer and John M. Felsing. This book has a good description of FDD but is weighed down with a specific modeling approach.

Recently, Software Engineering Radio had an interview with Jeff DeLuca, one of the creators of feature driven development. I found it to be a good introduction to the topic. However, for a practitioner of FDD there will be nothing new here.

Posted in software engineering, project management | No Comments »

December 10, 2007 by mensming.

I came across a reference to a new online testing resource - MSDN Tester Center located at http://www.msdn.com/testercenter. The site is fairly new but I think it shows promise, especially for people new to the software testing field.

In his introduction to the site, James Whittaker says that one of the purposes of the site is to spread the testing knowledge used internally at Microsoft - especially from those people who do not necessarily speak at conferences or write papers. Having met many talented testers from Microsoft, I think this is a great idea.

As far as content, it is still pretty light - about 4 papers, a dozen videos (each about 5 minutes long) and links to a couple of blogs. But it is new and I like the intent. I will definitely be keeping an eye on it.

Posted in professional development, training, software engineering | No Comments »

March 29, 2007 by mensming.

As I have mentioned before, I attended a breakfast talk by Steve McConnell (http://www.construx.com) entitled “Legacy of Agile Software Development”. During the talk, Steve skipped over the section of the slides labeled “Agile Practices That Tend to be Problematic”. I grabbed the slides after the presentation to see what he had to say.

Note: Steve is not necessarily saying these are bad — just that the teams his company has evaluated, these practices have not provided the value that they promise.

• System Metaphor - Least understood practice
• On-Site Customer - Difficult to achieve
• Collective Code Ownership - Uneven code quality and sometimes results in lack of ownership.
• Pair Programming - Sweet spot between junior and senior programmer
• Refactoring - Good practice whose name is used to cover up bad behavior

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March 25, 2007 by mensming.

I attended a breakfast presentation by Steve McConnell (http://www.construx.com) entitled “Legacy of Agile Software Development”. A phrase that caught my attention was “creating opportunities to incorporate change”.

As we all know, The Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/) states valuing “responding to change over following a plan”. Steve’s presentation summarizing agile values had “responding to change” struck out and replaced with “creating opportunities to incorporate change. This struck a chord with me. I have seen many teams that call themselves agile (although I would argue that they were not…) who were resistant to responding to customer requests. Usually, they delay the request stating some rule of the methodology they are following. Almost always, the methodology would allow them to respond to the change — “create the opportunity to incorporate change” — yet the team resists. You can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink.

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March 16, 2007 by mensming.

I came across a reference to a Google custom search engine focused on process improvement and software engineering created by Gupta Boda.

PRISE - PRocess Improvement and Software Engineering (alpha)

Posted in software engineering, process improvement, Uncategorized | No Comments »