Agile Otter Blog

Tim Ottinger’s thoughts on software development.

AI Slowdown Listicle

flow

productivity

listicle

In 2025/2026, it was noted that coding faster didn’t necessarily mean delivering sooner. Maybe coding was not the bottleneck. A listicle.

Nov 10, 2026

Listicle: Does AI Need Craft?

Agentic coding should be judged by safe delivery, not generation speed

listicle

programming

A listicle on the need of code craft in the age of AI

Nov 10, 2026

Speculating on Challenges of Spec-Driven Development

A forward-looking list of challenges for spec-driven development, including aging documents and the need to keep specifications aligned with change.

Oct 18, 2026

Why redesign doesn’t happen (enough)

Code stays anchored to its original shape when individually assigned work and merge-conflict risk discourage redesign as understanding grows.

Sep 29, 2026

The Ticket Is Not The Work

flow

continuousDelivery

Tickets can support software development, but they are representations of work rather than the collaborative learning and delivery work itself.

Sep 26, 2026

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets made programming accessible to people who could type, make lists, and do arithmetic, and their lessons still matter for software tools.

Aug 26, 2026

Eight Code Virtues

CodeVirtues

A unified guide to Working, Unique, Simple, Clear, Easy, Developed, Brief, and the newly added eighth code virtue: Coherent.

Aug 19, 2026

Progressive Admission Pattern - story slicing

Progressive admission starts an end-to-end system closed, then admits one recognized input shape at a time while unsupported cases remain explicit.

Aug 11, 2026

2006 “Sooner Not Faster” article

republish

The original 2006 “Sooner, Not Faster” article argues that agile development reduces time to useful results without relying on shortcuts or lower quality.

Jul 15, 2026

Do agents think you’re doing agile wrong?

flow

scrum

teams

An intentionally unprimed chatbot answer examines sprint planning, ticket assignment, individual utilization, team flow, and delivery goals.

Jun 15, 2026

Sooner - And sooner still

flow

continuousDelivery

Two decades of “Sooner, Not Faster” connect small releases, feedback, flow, queues, inventories, and continuous delivery.

Jun 6, 2026

Flow theory in short

flow

Handoffs create queues, busy receivers deepen those queues, and rejection loops disrupt work. Improving flow requires seeing the whole system.

Jun 5, 2026

The Faros Whiplash and The Systems View

flow

teams

The Faros report shows AI-assisted teams producing more code and activity while waiting, reviews, lead time, incidents, and bugs all increase.

Jun 3, 2026

Time for an 8th Virtue: Coherence

CodeVirtues

Coherence joins the seven code virtues to describe how well concepts, abstractions, vocabulary, architecture, patterns, and representations fit together.

Jun 3, 2026

Agile, YAGNI, Smaller Steps, Bikes and Automobiles…

learning

The familiar incremental-vehicle illustration is about delivering useful capability, learning from it, and avoiding work that later proves unnecessary.

May 27, 2026

Pipeline Gates Calculator

teams

The Pipeline Gates Calculator explores how quality-gate duration and pass rates affect a team’s regular flow of work.

Mar 28, 2026

Believing In People

learning

People grow between boredom and anxiety, where the world is stable enough to build skill yet challenging enough to keep learning.

Feb 13, 2026

Do You Even Plan, Bro?

Many planning meetings merely assign tasks. Real planning presents a plan, exposes questions, and gives the group room to assess and revise it.

Feb 6, 2026

The Big Release Downward Spiral

Large releases increase risk and bureaucracy, which encourages organizations to stockpile still more work and deepen the release problem.

Feb 3, 2026

Working in Groups: Compromises or Contributions?

Group work can dilute ideas through compromise, or strengthen them through diverse contributions. The working model determines which result we get.

Feb 3, 2026

Considering Spec Driven Development

Spec-driven development can resemble failed big-design-up-front practices or disciplined specification in tight feedback loops; the distinction matters.

Jan 20, 2026

Bash Variable Expansion

A compact reference for useful Bash parameter expansions: required variables, defaults, substrings, lengths, case conversion, and related forms.

Jan 17, 2026

Does AI help us care less?

teams

AI-assisted workflows can reduce cognitive effort, but delegating thought too readily risks weakening care, teamwork, understanding, and responsibility.

Jan 16, 2026

I can’t test that, it uses STDOUT (Python)

testing

Python code that writes to STDOUT is testable. Several small techniques turn print statements from a testing barrier into an ordinary dependency.

Nov 14, 2025

A vimrc starter

A starter .vimrc assembled from recommendations in Use Vim Like a Pro, with practical defaults for syntax, modes, completion, indentation, searching, and editing.

Oct 16, 2025

What Shape Should My Code Take? (using FizzBuzz)

FizzBuzz illustrates how the shape of code affects the cost of change: a neat truth-table solution becomes awkward when a new divisibility rule arrives.

Oct 16, 2025

Convenience Scripts for Projects

A few familiar scripts can make every project easier to work in: clean_start, onboard, run, run_tests, and run_integration_tests. Give setup, cleanup, running, and verification a predictable home.

Sep 30, 2025

Why is working faster not working?

flow

productivity

Why making developers work faster can slow delivery: queues, work in progress, rework, and quality gates.

Sep 12, 2025

Subjectivity: Who is to say what’s right?

Software development choices have consequences. How can we discuss better and worse approaches without treating every judgment as mere opinion?

Jul 21, 2025

A quick note on “At Scale”

The problem of scale: how organizational size can make product development slow, expensive, and frustrating.

Jul 9, 2025

Who (the heck) Am I?

TDD

I’m a long-time developer, agilist, XPer, CI/CD, teaming/ensemble, TDD, and general software delivery specialist.

Jul 9, 2025

Rework in software is the correction of unacceptable code. That doesn’t include refactoring, which corrects only the design and expression of ideas without changing what the code does. This is limited to “something does not work correctly and we can’t let it be released.”

Jul 7, 2025

There is No Automatic Reset for Engineering

In engineering, software or otherwise, whatever decision we make this month, we have to live with it from now on, or until someone invests additional time in reversing it.

Mar 3, 2025

Pair Programming Listicle

listicle

pair programming

There are many ways to collaborate, and pair programming is the first many people consider. The fact that other ways exist in no way diminishes the value of pair programming—if you’re doing it correctly and don’t fall into the key dysfunctions.

Feb 11, 2025

Irresponsibility: Estimates and NoEstimates

Sometimes the argument is made that not estimating is irresponsible .

Dec 11, 2024

Basic Microphone Usage

How to use microphones (pay special attention to (3) and (12)!!!! :

Aug 6, 2024

Profitable Struggle and Unprofitable Struggle

Some struggles build useful skills; others consume effort without helping us improve. How can we tell the difference?

May 24, 2024

Definition-by-Dysfunction

scrum

Since they didn’t start with a good definition of pair programming, that experience became the definition of pair programming. They had a defining dysfunction. Unless something new happens, they will forever see pair programming as wasteful and pointless practice.

Feb 27, 2024

Listicle on Flow and Teamwork

listicle

flow

teams

Some article links related to solo vs group, flow, productivity, and predictability.

Feb 27, 2024

Fundamentally Wrong

testing

TDD

An article has been shared with me by several friends and also by some critics, and some people who are both, describing how TDD is fundamentally wrong, and doing test-after-development is better.

Jan 15, 2024

Python Listicle!

listicle

Learning Python is one of those things where one can begin quite easily and quickly, but there is some depth to the language that one will want to understand and use once one gets past the most elementary early uses.

Jan 5, 2024

Leadership.

leadership

learning

Leadership means helping people learn to make good choices and work together.

Dec 20, 2023

Choose your Expression: Structural Matching, IF-ELSE, and Dictionaries

So, I have a command line utility that collects and presents some time-series data. What it is isn’t important, but dates are involved.

Nov 22, 2023

CSS Specificity Rundown

CSS really is fun. No, seriously. I’m not being sarcastic here.

Aug 30, 2023

Code Smells Listicle

listicle

CodeVirtues

clean code

After many times looking up various resources on code smells and code smell taxonomies, I finally decided to make a listicle (list article) of these.

Apr 6, 2022

What does Tim have against “private” methods?

Arbitrarily located functions, hidden from view, repeated by invention and copying, likely hiding the opportunity for Single Point Of Truth (SPOT) abstractions and libraries that would make everyone’s job a little easier.

Mar 14, 2022

Splitting Stories - A Resource Listicle

listicle

I’ve noticed that for several years now, one of the most frequently asked questions in agile forums deals with the splitting of stories.

Mar 3, 2022

Maximize Value, not Quantity

scrum

A conversation about product ownership, maximizing value, and the pressure to deliver more features.

Feb 18, 2022

Can teams be accountable for delivery of features?

teams

Including delivery/deployment in the definition of done I’m told is unfair because teams aren’t in control of what gets delivered or when.

Feb 15, 2022

The inefficiency of tests

testing

You know that human efficiency is high - it’s a quick, reliable, and safe way to create a system that can be safely refactored, extended, modified. You value safety over efficiency, and efficiency is a side-effect.

Oct 11, 2021

FIRST: an idea that ran away from home

FIRST

listicle

testing

Quite some years ago, Brett Schuchert and I invented the acronym FIRST for micro-tests, though we called them unit tests (as was common at the time). This was later included in Agile In A Flash and was also published in a Pragmatic…

Sep 10, 2021

Reimagining Work vs Doing The Same Better

republish

XP didn’t come from a series of incremental improvements to waterfall processes. They took on a change in axioms. They reimagined the development process.

Aug 11, 2021

Outliving The Great Variable Shortage

republish

testing

naming

clean code

One of the more annoying problems in code, confounding readability and maintainability, frustrating test-writing, is that of the multidomain variable.

Aug 6, 2021

A Whole Lot Of Nope

In light of recent outrages, there are a lot of people posting bloodthirsty things on social media. If you post bloodthirsty things, I want you to know I don’t stand with…

Jun 1, 2020

Speech Hacks to be More Decisive

leadership

communication

I was in a leadership program with Christoper Avery some years ago. In that program, people would say “don’t should on yourself.” Another friend had years ago told me that…

May 4, 2020

Some Covid-19 Information

listicle

Hello all. From time to time, I will post something that is not on-brand for Agile Otter Blog at all, but is of concern at a point in time or in celebration or mourning. T…

Mar 17, 2020

The Laptop “Problem”

A few friends of mine have been pretty down on people using computing devices during meetings. The very presence of open laptops, tablets, phones, etc, gives them the…

Feb 27, 2020

Disciplined Breaks, Two Years On

I described Disciplined Breaks here in 2017. Sometimes people ask me how that’s working. I wish my answer was more confident and assertive, but what I can say is “it…

Oct 5, 2019

The Coward’s Confrontation: Leadership fail

leadership

communication

I want to introduce you all to a term: Cowards’ Confrontation: a rule made in order to avoid having an uncomfortable conversation with an individual, which rule is either…

Sep 26, 2019

Is It My Fault You Can’t Handle The Truth?

You can’t handle it! In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to the idea of hyper-rationality. I think it was under another name (to be given shortly)…

Sep 23, 2019

Q&A on Velocity, Part X

VelocitySeries

flow

management

In the last installment we talked about communication between managers and employees, efficiency notions, and other key continuous improvement ideas. This installment…

Sep 2, 2019

No Common Sense in Agile

People say that agile is “just common sense.” I wish. I mean, it’s well-precedented and everything makes sense. But there is nothing common about it. It’s…

Aug 26, 2019

The relationship between Agile and Scrum

scrum

A lot of people’s first brush with Agile is during Scrum training. There is usually some mention of the Agile Manifesto and its 12 Principles, maybe even 10 or 20 minutes…

Aug 24, 2019

My favorite Estimates and NoEstimates exchange so far.

Likewise, how much will you pay for electricity in the house you live in, all totaled up? Or my earlier grocery example. You don’t consider those “buying a lifetime’s…

Aug 23, 2019

Q&A on Velocity, Part IX

productivity

management

VelocitySeries

teams

In the last installment, we talked about reasons that velocity goes up without any more accomplishment by the team. This is a disturbing occurrence to many managers who…

Aug 23, 2019

Improve Your Unit Testing 12 Ways

testing

FIRST

Everyone these days seems to understand that having unit tests are an important part of the work of developing software. Yet, people struggle with the practice. Here are…

Apr 18, 2019

Software Development as Buying-A-Thing Or Co-Creating?

republish

“When will it all be completed” is a question that many people can’t imagine not asking. “When will we start making money from this?” is maybe a better question. “I…

Mar 26, 2019

Signal-to-Noise: The Workspace Application

republish

I have seen people who think open spaces rock, and people declaring them “the worst possible layout.” Some people like offices (find them “essential”) and others hate…

Mar 11, 2019

Q&A on Velocity, Part VIII

VelocitySeries

In our previous post, we discussed doing smaller units of work, and doing no more of them than we need to fulfill an end-user’s needs. This way, we get many things done, we…

Dec 20, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part VII

VelocitySeries

In Part VI we discussed faux bottlenecks and blaming. These are often the result of having expectations that cannot be met, a phenomenon that was discussed in the last…

Nov 5, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part VI

VelocitySeries

flow

productivity

In Part V, we examined the relationship between working harder and going faster. I hope that the message you came away with was that we want people to work less hard and…

Oct 29, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part V

VelocitySeries

flow

In Part IV, we talked about the thorny clashes between the reality of promises, and the reality of development. This installment picks up on some truths about working…

Oct 24, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part IV

VelocitySeries

In our last installment, part III, we talked about the reality of reality and contrasted that to the made-up-ness of schedules and estimates and promises. Today we take a…

Oct 15, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part III

VelocitySeries

In Part II, we talked about velocity and the (glossed-over) line about making it easier to get work done instead of pushing harder. A was asking if changing the units used…

Jul 28, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part II

VelocitySeries

flow

teams

See Part 1, in which we present a deep truth about velocity and story points. A’s team has turned in two sprints, with velocity of 19 on the first and 23 on the second. A…

Jul 25, 2018

Don’t Be Dreadful

A few weeks back, I published a blog about people complaining in a company. The article has received a lot of attention and love, and I appreciate all of you who retweeted…

Jul 19, 2018

Q&A on Velocity, Part I

VelocitySeries

Having had many conversations about velocity (and many blog posts here and at the Industrial Logic Blog) one day I decided to write up an example of the conversation as if…

Jul 17, 2018

The Scatter-Gather Method of Software Development

management

There is a certain theory of agile development which is built on factory thinking, using division and management of labor to accomplish large projects. You have a big…

Jul 5, 2018

Peace and Curiosity against Righteous Indignation

All anger presents as righteous indignation. Have you ever been angry without thinking you had every right to be so? The person you’re angry with certainly seems to…

Jun 27, 2018

Organizational Dysfunction

teams

For decades now, people are taught a definition of “success”: a successful team delivers the full scope on time and under budget. It has been the mantra of project…

Jun 26, 2018

Agile In A Nutshell

I had answered a question on LinkedIn, after which a friend was kind enough to quote my answer on twitter with a kind recommendation. I decided to reproduce that answer…

Jun 25, 2018

Owner, Renter, Guest, Vandal?

learning

What is your role in the code base you find yourself in today? Owner? Renter? Guest? Visitor? Vandal? I ask seriously because I’m learning that the answers matter. A…

Jun 14, 2018

Piecing it together without tests…

testing

I wrote a thing yesterday…. it was in python, and I was using PyCharm (which is very nice, and a departure from using vim + sniffer). It was something I didn’t know how to…

Jun 13, 2018

Complainers

When you hear “those people are always complaining” then you’re probably looking at a systemic problem. It’s probably not a personality flaw; it’s probably that the…

Jun 12, 2018

The world, joyfully shining from a desktop.

Sometimes this world gives me joy. I take photos as I travel. I also try to take some time to see the world and take extra photos. One day I realized that I could set…

Apr 20, 2018

The Impossible Every Day

This is a slightly-edited re-presentation of a thread in Twitter. Original post Unrolled post As twitter is ephemeral, and blogs are longer-lasting (and easy to…

Mar 9, 2018

Predictability as Maturity or System?

teams

The predictability of a team is subject to the predictability of the work . Duration of a task depends on three things primarily: Raw effort – fairly predictable…

Mar 5, 2018

A little signal-to-noise

How noise obscures useful information, and why improving the signal-to-noise ratio matters.

Jan 31, 2018

How To Be Miserable (or Not)

I came across an interesting article the other day, stating: EXPECTATION – OBSERVATION = FRUSTRATION I think this is really good. However, I think there should…

Jan 25, 2018

Feeling Safe?

safety

I finally got around to watching Frozen . I don’t have any small children of my own and wasn’t really interested in it for my own viewing pleasure, so it took a long time.…

Dec 11, 2017

Taking Breaks in a Disciplined Way

teams

I worked with a team where everyone was trying to do pair-programming, but it was too hard for them. I asked what made it so hard, and they told me it was simply so…

Nov 27, 2017

Why TDD?

TDD

Why do we care if people call what they’re doing TDD or BDD or why do we care if they actually do it? When people mislabel what they’re doing and refer to it as “BDD”…

Sep 26, 2017

The 5 Ts

teams

management

When I’m talking to Agile teams, we often talk about the role of management: whether it exists, and if so what it is. I always fall back to the principles of the agile…

Sep 18, 2017

Can We Process Our Hurts Without Going To Categories?

People who are hurt and angry sometimes give in to two unproductive natural urges: Hurt the other back so they’ll think twice next time Disconnect oneself from…

Aug 18, 2017

A VERY brief note on certification..

coaching

I’m well-known for my distaste of certifications for software developers, trainers, and coaches. What seems to be less-well-known is the reasoning behind that. GETTING…

Aug 15, 2017

There is no such thing as a scrum development team….

scrum

teams

Yeah, I know that’s a heck of a clickbait title, but it’s also the thesis of this blog post. According to the Scrum Guide (2016): The Development Team consists of…

Jul 19, 2017

Agile Training Roller Coaster

teams

coaching

A long time ago, I was in a company that (like my current company) was known for training and coaching agile teams. Some of our customers were continually asking us if we…

Jul 12, 2017

A Surprising Demotivator

motivation

I almost took the elevator up to my room today. A year or two ago, my wife bought me one of those step-counting devices, you know the ones which tell you how many steps…

Jul 7, 2017

The Genie Story

A clever man was crossing the ocean when his ship was capsized in a storm. He was the only survivor. Hungry, thirsty, and battered, he struggled to shore on a small island. …

Jun 22, 2017

Making people do what we want…

Amitai Schlier and Ryan Ripley conducted a session at Big Apple Scrum Day entitled “the care and feeding of T-shaped people” which was essentially a panel discussion taking…

May 16, 2017

Calibrate Your Dopplegangers

I once knew a woman who confided that she lived with the disapproving, exhausting ghost of her long-dead mother. It was a disembodied voice in her head that wouldn’t let…

May 12, 2017

Make People Awesome? Give Them Superpowers!

We need to explain our primary statement of benevolence, expressed as “make people awesome.” This is intended to express that have an explicit goal of…

Mar 13, 2017

The Lightweight Tweetstream

flow

continuousDelivery

teams

Some innovators came through and invented radically different ways of working, usually through collaboration and teamwork. The idea of simplifying the workflow was met with…

Mar 12, 2017

The Dev Goal

Write useful code only. Don’t write defects. Don’t write code that invites others to create defects. Don’t write code which hides or obfuscates defects (yours or…

Feb 10, 2017

Getting stuff done.

testing

By the end of the day, the new change was relatively easy, and the code where the change must be implemented was all nicely “under test.” Several new techniques were all…

Jan 16, 2017

Implicit Time-Based Coupling - Inside a Class.

When methods must be called in a particular order, hidden dependencies make a class harder to understand and use safely.

Dec 20, 2016

The Employee’s Unapproved Feature

reign in your rogue employee give her more influence in deciding future features ignore this one infraction since it worked out okay

Dec 14, 2016

TDD: Start With A Failing Test

testing

TDD

The question was asked:

Dec 2, 2016

For those of you keeping track…

It sounds like my blog has ranked this world the 14-millionth favorite, but I think it means the opposite. I have plenty of margin here so that I can improve without…

Nov 14, 2016

Support Each Other

if we all could put curiosity and interest in others over the warm self-righteous glow of disdaining and judging, then we could do all things.

Nov 9, 2016

But In The Real World

“In the real world” is a pretty arrogant thing to say, and frankly triggers me a bit. I’d like to say I was past this, but I still have to process the upset and forgive…

Nov 2, 2016

Heretics of Agile at DSM Agile 2016

At the end of dsmAgile, we had a session full of “lean coffee” style meetings in a big noisy room with an open bar (so it wasn’t so much coffee people were sipping as much…

Sep 30, 2016

Political Correctness and Truth

Saying hurtful things Not being politically correct Telling the truth

Sep 30, 2016

14 Challenges For Agile Adoption

The problem seems to be largely one of unlearning the way that software was done in the days before agile. People got used to working alone, being told what to do, being…

Sep 28, 2016

The Curiosity Space

Sometimes we get what we expect. The reactions to that? Either satisfaction or no real reaction at all. When I put my bread in the toaster and it toasts it according to…

Aug 23, 2016

The Relevance Ratio

The interesting idea here is that maybe we can get more done if we tap into the kind of work (solo or collaborative) afforded by our environment, or (better, and perhaps more radically) change our environment to support the kind of work we need to do.

Aug 2, 2016

The Intimidation Cycle

safety

X is afraid of Y, so X tries to make Y afraid of them in return, and X escalates to make sure Y is the more afraid, so

Aug 1, 2016

Curiosity over Judgment: getting past defensiveness.

communication

safety

But of course, to get past judgment and to an end, both people are probably going to have to have this conversation – in curiosity and not in blame or judgment. I wish the…

Jul 7, 2016

What is “Agile”?

Most of agile is about delivering sooner and a lot more often, so that you can incorporate the client’s desires and feedback into your daily work.

Jul 1, 2016

Naming is still hard.

naming

I welcome your comments and criticisms.

Apr 5, 2016

Sarah and Joe Write Features

Excellent answers Michael, George, and Tom. If you don’t know these people, do look them up and give them a follow.

Feb 18, 2016

Naming good is what Position?

naming

I want to drop in a quick note about variable and class naming, one of my favorite hobby horses.

Feb 3, 2016

The Productivity Formula

productivity

Of all the poor ways one may define Productivity for software developers, there are some really horrible formulae including “lines of code per developer” and “story points per iteration”, measures which really measure all the wrong things and which might send Charles Goodhart into a tizzy.

Dec 9, 2015

Plate-Emptying

flow

Over at Reddit there is a discussion about my Stop Per-Person Swimlanes article at Industrial Logic. This surfaced what seems to be a common misunderstanding. Some…

Nov 14, 2015

What is “enterprise”

Gathered answers:

Nov 11, 2015

Dot-Programming your Object Oriented Code

Let’s say the object is a “Playlist.” Don’t worry about what that means, just stay with me here. And assume you’re writing a report to say which playlists are used by which…

Oct 16, 2015

What To Read

There was an opportunity at a recent open space conference for Mike Rizzi and myself to conduct a short session on “what to read.” As expected, there is more here than…

Oct 15, 2015

How Is The “Year of Living Shamelessly” Going?

My Year Of Living Shamelessly is a developmental experiment. How is yours going?

Oct 2, 2015

Principles for Large Organizations

agile at scale

agile

I was speaking with my friend Bryan who, like myself, does a lot of work with very large organizations. Many of them are great places and have sincere interest in being…

Oct 2, 2015

The Manifesto Didn’t Start It All

Not quite. It got a name and a manifesto then, but it was a gathering of practitioners of “lightweight methods” (and one waterfall guy: Hi Steve) who gathered and wrote…

Sep 24, 2015

Confirmation Bias and The Twelve-Day Technical Problem

learning

Charlie is a developer. He’s just been assigned/volunteered to take on an interesting technical challenge. It will involve research, learning, and experimentation so it is…

Sep 17, 2015

Making Data Relationships Obvious

microtests

clean code

Make the relationships between data values explicit so readers do not have to reconstruct their meaning.

Sep 9, 2015

Sick of Eating: Planning Stress

What if we only needed to plan for a month at a time? It is much easier. We can find out in mere weeks what a customer likes or doesn’t like. A new feature that is not 100%…

Sep 6, 2015

Struggling is Not Lying

That’s a nice story, maybe, but what the heck is it doing on the Agile Otter blog? Isn’t this a software blog? Well, yes it is. The point is that organizations and people…

Sep 1, 2015

We Value Things On The Left More….

take back agile

What power could there possibly be in stating that you like some things more than other things? Heck, these things are not even opposites.

Aug 31, 2015

Singh’s Inevitable Avoidance Principle

continuousDelivery

I’ve been conversing with others who have the same sense of Take Back Agile and a few whose sense of departure from non-agile “agile methods” are a bit more pointed. I…

Aug 27, 2015

An End To Dueling Strawmen?

Of course you don’t. Nor do the people you’re arguing with/against. Nobody believes that switching to XP or Scrum will make everything trivially easy and prevent every kind of design issue or organizational dynamic or schedule interruption possible.

Aug 25, 2015

Product Owners Maximizing Value

scrum

The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the work done. Check out this list of responsibilities from the Scrum Guide (2013):

Aug 24, 2015

Workspace improvements from Agile Practices Workshop at Agile 2015

testing

All workstations in one room White boards and writing utensils Post-it Notes Videoconferencing Tools Proper & available hardware for testing and experimenting.

Aug 15, 2015

(Revisionist) History of QA Departments

management

In due course, adversarial QA was considered good management and seldom questioned by professionals. It had crossed the line from “common practice” to “moral imperative. I…

Aug 13, 2015

The BS Line

responsibility

testing

retrospective

teams

The line between real work and bureaucratic silliness reveals what a team values and what it tends to postpone.

Aug 12, 2015

Write Me An Online Agile Tool

teams

I would rather work with physical tools than online, but frankly my own team is highly distributed and so we sometimes need to be able to visualize and communicate our…

Aug 7, 2015

The #NoEstimates Hashtag

What the NoEstimates hashtag is for, and where to find the discussion.

Jul 23, 2015

The Poo-shoe Effect

naming

I’ve had enough questions and references to this that I need to explain this odd effect with the fashionably Asian-sounding name, which is being mentioned in boardrooms and…

Jul 17, 2015

A Quick Rundown on Performance Appraisals and Reviews.

management

The topic of annual reviews comes up pretty often. There has been a gathering tide of organizations moving away from traditional performance management techniques because they are perceived as an expensive process that does not actually…

Jul 14, 2015

Interview at QCon London with Ben Linders

I just realized that I should post my interview from London which is titled “The Importance Of Technical Practices in Agile.” Ben Linders and I sat down and talked. Sadly…

Jul 3, 2015

Taking Back Agile at QConLondon with Ruud Wijnands

Ruud and I talked about taking back agile at QConLondon.

Jul 3, 2015

Insincerity and Process

I read a lot of disappointed tweets, reddit posts, etc about agile development processes, especially since the whole Take Back Agile thing started. There is an honest…

Jun 22, 2015

Male Privilege

If I get a hair cut and dress up nice, nobody calls me a whore, nor is a stranger likely to feel entitled to have a grab or fondle. I’d like to extend this from male…

Jun 16, 2015

My Life On The Road

It’s weird, but it’s also pretty cool. I’ve seen the Great Wall of China, the great cities of Europe, including London, Edinburgh, Paris, Munich, Budapest and more. I’ve…

Jun 10, 2015

Writing the BDDs… Good Lord, NO!

Listen, you know how it is if you go out to eat and your friend has a big ole chive stuck to a front tooth and you are thinking that you don’t want to embarrass your friend…

May 28, 2015

This is NOT the End.

This is not the last sprint. There will be more after this. You don’t have to have everything this week, and it’s more important to deliver than to have every possible…

May 19, 2015

The Company: Can we talk about it?

We talk a lot about changing cultures. There’s a lot of inspirational, humanistic content in agile conferences and forums and books and blogs. We tell our success tales in…

May 8, 2015

Bonus for Productivity?

motivation

safety

productivity

At Industrial Logic, we have bonuses. We have a health-n-safety bonus which we spend making our lives better. Some pay gym memberships. Others buy standing desks or…

Apr 18, 2015

Too Many Developers?

agile at scale

teams

technical debt

agile

You already know some developers are more effective than others.

Apr 17, 2015

Individual Work Assignments: Neither Agile Nor Team

flow

teams

I managed to set off a small avalanche of retweets, agreement, and absolute angst in the past few weeks, when something I’d said sometime last year appeared as a quote in a lovely frame (thank you so much Agile Fortune!).

Apr 14, 2015

Can Scrum Teams Have Managers.

republish

scrum

management

safety

“Is it safe to say PM has to acquire new skills to make himself fit in the scrum process?” This question was asked in a scrum forum on Linked In, and many interesting…

Mar 30, 2015

QCon London: Taking back development (Take Agile Back).

teams

Take Back Agile: “If this is agile, take it back.” Take Back Agile: “Give me my agile back.” Take Back Agile: “… to your team.”

Mar 6, 2015

On The Agile Manifesto

Everyone points to the four “preferences” part of the manifesto and ignores the more important first paragraph, and the far more important second page (“principles”). Key…

Mar 4, 2015

Agile At Heart?

continuousDelivery

teams

This is not an agile team. Even if they all have experienced a personal agile conversion, and have agile written in their hearts, this is not an agile team. “Faith without…

Feb 17, 2015

Sleep and Insight

This sounds a lot like Wallas’ ideas of “incubation” and “enlightnment” come to light again. Fascinating.

Feb 17, 2015

Smarter Teams

teams

An interesting article was published in the New York Times recently reporting that, experimentally at least, teams have a measurable collective intelligence, and that this intelligence is drawn from unexpected wells.

Jan 21, 2015

Other side of the CAR, not the POST.

teams

A video illustrates a familiar mistake: changing the wrong thing when trying to improve a team’s results.

Dec 30, 2014

Years’ End, Years’ Begin

2015 is the year I throw on as many skills as I can afford/tolerate/enjoy. Last year I learned a (very) little bit of Groovy and Swift and Javascript even though it was The…

Dec 29, 2014

Working Well Enough: the Four Questions

coaching

continuous improvement

teams

If all four of those are true for a team, then that team probably doesn’t need help. Of course if those are true, then the team is poised to provide a lot of help to other…

Dec 15, 2014

My itsy-bitsy contribution to Git

This is from 2005, when I was at an all-linux, all-python shop called Progeny Linux Systems. A lovely time, really. Great people, interesting technology, challenges and opportunities every day. Not everything we did was stellar, but we…

Dec 8, 2014

Otter’s Law

responsibility

safety

scrum

take back agile

I’ve ranted about change gone wrong and methodologies followed badly and horrible oversales and undersales and all, but it comes down to otter’s law ultimately. Too many…

Nov 19, 2014

Wrong naming revisit

naming

Revisiting a naming example: how much meaning does a variable name give the reader?

Nov 4, 2014

What is a Coach?

coaching

A coach works with people to improve their abilities and the way they interact with teammates and peers. The teaching comes through interaction, at the request and permission of the client.

Nov 3, 2014

Preplanning Poker: Is This Story Even Possible?

agile

Before putting a story into the sprint backlog, do we even agree on what it means? Five cards—Defer, Accept, Reject, Explore, Split—can help a team decide whether it dares tackle the feature as given.

Oct 23, 2014

Microtesting TDD: A Quick Checklist

testing

TDD

See each test fail at least once (so you can trust it). Make test fail messages helpful because they fail when you are working on something else. Prioritize! Use a…

Oct 20, 2014

Your Transition Isn’t Very Agile

learning

coaching

agile

Agile’s teaching of “thin, vertical slices” doesn’t apply just to features.

Oct 17, 2014

Programming Is Mostly Thinking

Pretend you have a really great programming day. You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don’t get distracted or interrupted…

Sep 29, 2014

Dave Coplin Reimagines The Office

teams

safety

Understand your office situation better w/RSA Animate & David Coplin Raised many interesting points. I still see value in being able to pair and mob, and would like to…

Sep 10, 2014

Christopher Avery and The Responsibility Process (vid)

psychology

responsibility

coaching

Here is Christopher Avery shows us a mental model that will help us to become more responsible. I found it concise and helpful. I hope you may also.

Sep 5, 2014

Getting Through To Each Other

communication

Communication is a very human process. Every being has its own mental model of a domain Connected to it is a hearing/understanding apparatus. When you tell me the sky is…

Sep 2, 2014

Why Your Code Has So Much Duplication

refactoring

clean code

ActionBlock writeToConsole1 = new ActionBlock ( integer => Console.WriteLine( “Console 1:” + integer ) );

Aug 26, 2014

Being the Remote Programmer - A Reflection

But I was happy to be a remote, and to pair with teammates remotely, and to have a little more control over my environment, and I accepted the bad with the good. It had advantages.

Aug 18, 2014

The Good Guilt Trip

responsibility

If these feelings are a good and useful adaptation to living socially, I’m interested in information that will adjust or inform my opinion about this sense of social…

Aug 7, 2014

Process Improvement Principles

agreements

continuous improvement

safety

anzen

It looks a lot like a rather famous manifesto (the middle of it anyway) but it is not a manifesto.

Jun 11, 2014

Defending Scrum Against Stupid Arguments

scrum

agile

anzen

listicle

I’m okay with all of that. All valid, informed arguments are welcome. I don’t have a sacred cow or beloved method that I’m unwilling to part with. I’m an Anzeneer, not…

May 28, 2014

Complicated Conversations Considered Keystone Hazards

agreements

anzen

communication

safety

In short, the fear is that the conversation will accomplish little other than making the initiator of the conversation feel belittled, confused, or marginalized. This risks…

May 14, 2014

Purist, Pragmatist, Iconoclast, Egotist

anzen

safety

The egotist wants to please himself more than he wants to achieve a goal or support a cause. He will do what makes him feel safe, comfortable, at ease, powerful. He does…

May 5, 2014

Agile, Post-agile, Beyond Agile… Where do we go next?

scrum

We started with 1. Our processes went through all these stages until we got to XP and its fellow travelers. But XP and Scrum were sufficiently magic to start a ripple again…

Apr 8, 2014

Ignorance + Inspiration = What?!

I suspect that “ignorance + inspiration” is really not the surefire recipe for success that inspirational speakers and feckless back-patters declare it to be. I want my…

Apr 2, 2014

Can I Start My Software Career As A Scrum Master or Coach?

scrum

coaching

If you have the qualities that make a good SM, you should work on becoming a professional scrum master by developing/growing/proving your raw talents and training. You…

Mar 27, 2014

3 Ways We Can Revive Agile

shared learning

build

take back agile

I was surprised to hear how much response came from this. Now we have a community on google and presence on linked in and yahoo groups and twitter. People are coming from the woodwork to say that they’re also sad about the state of…

Feb 19, 2014

I Want Agile Back

agile at scale

scrum

coaching

take back agile

Note: this was originally all plain text and a little shorter.

Feb 13, 2014

David Gray on Russ Ackoff

flow

David Gray wrote a great article in a funny place, as a comment to a really great YouTube video.

Feb 11, 2014

Agile and Waterfall: More Different Than You Think

management

agile

republish

continuousDelivery

I suggest that the systems are axiomatically different. Agile values continuous delivery of value and responsiveness to market. Waterfall values a comprehensive plan and compliance to the plan until the final delivery.

Jan 30, 2014

Bug Teams v. The Nature Of Defects

pair programming

teams

management

learning

You realize that you’re not getting as much done as you expected to get done. It’s troublesome because you have plans and promises and releases to deal with. You’re likely…

Jan 23, 2014

Asking the Wrong Questions

management

scrum

communication

Most of us who are over 30 and in the Agile camps have done exactly that. As an official greybeard I remember the “bad old days” quite well, and as a consultant I see that…

Dec 19, 2013

Parkinson’s Law:

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Dec 17, 2013

Scrum Managers: are they the worst?

scrum

management

I participate in a number of forums where I am happy to help people understand agile methods and practices. I see dozens of questions every week asked (and often answered!) by people who are operating in a system they simply don’t…

Nov 28, 2013

TDD: more to know

pair programming

microtests

TDD

refactoring

Everyone knows the basic cycle of TDD. You should also know the improved Industrial Logic version of the TDD cycle. You have heard Uncle Bob’s three rules.

Nov 12, 2013

Safety Journey

testing

safety

I’ve gotten into the idea of tech safety when it comes to testing and coding. I get it as a value for deployment, setting up work environments, or practicing. When it comes…

Oct 9, 2013

Working Agreements

agreements

shared learning

teamwork

safety

Safety in decision-making and action-taking is all caught up in expectations and working agreements, and many of ours have been unspoken, unwritten, and un-negotiated. As a result, it is easy to drop things, expecting others to pick…

Sep 20, 2013

The Interplay of Failure, Learning, and Options

failure

learning

agile

It’s not really the failing we value; it’s the opportunity for learning and the chance to exercise options.

Sep 11, 2013

The new project…

It’s been quiet on the blog lately, but not at home. My nine-year-old nephew has come to spend a year with us, to take advantage of Libby’s skill as a home schooler. He’s…

Sep 6, 2013

Three Steps to Safer Development

continuous integration

management

testing

technical debt

Sound familiar? Interested? Read The Engineering Manager’s Lament

Jul 26, 2013

Tests and Immersion in Code: The relationship

python

testing

productivity

TDD

If the build/test cycle is not incredibly fast, I will not participate in the code as fully and richly, instead falling back to rely on my IQ and memory and good…

Jul 24, 2013

It Can Still Be Awesome…

agile

communication

Official communication is muddy and obscured by political phrasing and they don’t have clarity. They are matrix-managed and constantly interrupted. They don’t have the…

Jul 10, 2013

Bash function for finding & editing content

I use this whenever I have a bunch of text files. It’s especially handy when you’re working with a markup language. I specifically wrote it to use ‘ vim ’ and the +/pattern …

Jun 21, 2013

Velocity and story point rundown

listicle

I write a lot about velocity because people ask me a lot of questions about it. Here are links to the write-ups I reference most in my daily work – which I tend to…

Jun 18, 2013

Pressure To Produce

management

When programmers complain about the pressure to produce more, I usually describe this as a positive thing. Programmers, managers, software companies, and consumers all want more and better software. It is the basic axiom of our field.

May 16, 2013

Wallas’ Four Stages of Creative Thought

agile

theory of productivity

In the 1926 book The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas explained that having an idea (a creative solution) requires four distinct phases or steps:

May 15, 2013

Invisibility of Process, Visibility of Results

theory of productivity

information radiators

programming

agile manager

Programmers and testers don’t assemble machinery or bend paperclips or mold parts from molten goo. They don’t stack boxes or bricks, or swing hammers. The work they do has no physical manifestation, which makes it both hard to observe…

May 14, 2013

The Best Job They Know How To Do

shared learning

retrospective

communication

learning

To make decisions, we have to understand the system we’re working in, and the consequences of our decisions. That means that most of the work of a programmer is learning, and very little of it actually involves typing.

May 13, 2013

Agile Documentation

Agile is not against documentation. It is merely lean, in that we don’t want to maintain piles of documentation that don’t actually help us product value for customers.

May 7, 2013

Hoarding Knowledge: sharing enhances productivity

theory of productivity

teams

productivity

agile manager

Teams euphemistically refer to this phenomenon as the bus number of the team – the number of people who, if they were hit and killed by a bus, would doom the entire project to failure. A bus number of one is an unacceptable risk. A bus…

May 6, 2013

Increasing Effort is Unsafe in Too Many Ways

The problem isn’t with effort, but with knowing what to do better. One of my clients told me “if you don’t know what else is possible, you tend to keep on working the way you know.”

May 1, 2013

Misunderstanding Quality

How low can quality go without losing customers? Deming challenges the question itself: improving the process can improve productivity, decrease costs, and capture the market.

May 1, 2013

Toward a New Theory of Productivity

productivity

If we accept that this labor is intellectual, and primarily consists of thinking and making decisions, then we have decades and centuries of literature to pull from to design a much better theory of productivity.

Apr 26, 2013

Tim’s 5 Observations About Estimating

I’m always concerned about wasting a lot of time and effort (ie generating waste) in order to become good at something that does not make my customers more successful. …

Mar 28, 2013

Waste = DOWNTIME

Defects Overproduction Waiting Non-utilized talent Transportation Inventory Motion Extra processing

Mar 28, 2013

Product Health Rules!

microtests

build

TDD

agile at scale

Build and test continuously, keeping the product healthy and ready for further development.

Mar 22, 2013

The Agile Genie

This genie is premium quality. His answers will be absolutely correct and appropriate for your use in your company, easily implementable, and guaranteed not to backfire. This is some great kind of genie!

Feb 12, 2013

Multitasking Considered Less Harmful?

productivity

When so much of the writing resonates deeply with me, this particular paragraph’s ending is jarring. Could Dr. Wallas, writing in 1926, be entirely wrong about…

Jan 31, 2013

Continual Improvement In A Flash - edits underway

Last month I released the first copy of Continual Improvement In A Flash, and you have all been very kind in providing feedback and corrections. Thank you for your purchases…

Jan 29, 2013

A Personal Note on the Passing of my Father

I usually don’t put anything deeply personal on this blog, but today I make an exception. For three years after his massive stroke, my dad was severely handicapped and…

Jan 16, 2013

Continual Improvement Book for Scrum Masters: first public release.

scrum

I’ve pulled the trigger on my first release of the scrum master book. You can pop over to the leanpub page and grab a sample, or even buy the book for $USD12.00. If you…

Jan 13, 2013

Home IT Suggestions?

I put up a note in facebook and g+ about how I want my home IT reworked. I’ve bought a new router that will help me with getting my wifi (used by family for non-work…

Jan 10, 2013

Continuous Improvement Book

ebook

continuous improvement

scrum master

I did not manage to use my Christmas break to get a lot of work done on the book. I tried, but there was much going on in our world (almost all good stuff) and I was unable…

Dec 27, 2012

Circling the Drain/Facing the Truth

continuous integration

feedback

learning organization

The item we didn’t know to put on the card is “situational awareness.” It’s the military concept that people are aware of position, direction, intention of teammates and the…

Dec 20, 2012

Code Oddity: Conditionally starting

Is it just me, or is this a pretty weird thing to see? I’ve seen it a half-dozen times in the past few months and I don’t think (outside of Duff’s device) I’ve seen a switch/case or if/else on the loop counter in years.

Dec 19, 2012

Robert Probst and the Cubicle Wars (we lost)

This is not an unfamiliar story. I think it has some parallels with other great movements of the past few decades in that some mechanical aspect of the original work is…

Dec 18, 2012

TLC Labs Doesn’t Do Performance Reviews

management

When you see your company asking how they can improve employee retention, try pointing them to this blog post and let them see what happens when people realize the futility…

Dec 2, 2012

A LeanPub book for Scrum Masters?

scrum master

ebook

retrospective

scrum

I’ve had a side-project that started because I’ve been working with dual-role (and one triple-role) Scrum Masters lately. I appreciate how hard it is for them to be good at…

Nov 29, 2012

There is no good way to eat soup with a knife.

agile coach

agile

management

agile manager

In light of the agile manifesto, those questions all sound like “what is the best way to eat soup with a knife?” There is no good way to eat soup with a knife. You can eat…

Nov 13, 2012

Not Fair

ottinger

psychology

Sometimes A is mad because B can abuse people, but A cannot. It would be “fair” enough if A could pass out the abuse too. This is a classic “meet the new boss; same as the old boss” scenario.

Oct 25, 2012

Save(d) The Art Of Thought!

ebook

psychology

learning organization

I think that someone needs to digitize and distribute this work, since it is as important as it is rare . Would you like to help? Do you know where we can get a copy? Who…

Sep 15, 2012

Simple v. Complicated

CodeVirtues

programming

Simple, then, doesn’t mean easy or easy to read. It means uncomplicated. It has the minimal number of concerns, terms, and operations. It could be inobvious and hard as hell…

Sep 13, 2012

14 Weird Observations About Agile Team Velocity

management

scrum master

scrum

agile manager

I frequently have to address questions about velocity, so in the interest of time I present all the answers here in a short post:

Sep 7, 2012

Context Driven Testing

testing

Following his link, I find the page on Context Driven Testing. I have not fully checked out the content (I’m coaching in Chicago today) so I thought I’d leave this as a…

Sep 6, 2012

Worst Case:

Guess what? You’re probably a pretty good performer. Still, there are guys out there who can do what you do a little better, faster, or easier. What are you going to do?

Sep 5, 2012

A Round Of Questions

teams

Please consider the same simple exercise with an existing team, and drop me a comment to let me know what question you asked, what the answer taught you, and how the…

Sep 4, 2012

Corporate IT is Often a Jerkwater Town

Some companies have wonderful, helpful, capable IT organizations. They are current with modern operating systems, networking, file sharing, caching and proxying, security…

Jun 6, 2012

Flash A Friend

Over at Agile In A Flash blog, Jeff and I have announced a new contest called “Flash A Friend.” You can win one deck for yourself, and another for a needy party you nominate. …

Jun 5, 2012

A Process For Naming Tests

agile in a flash

naming

testing

When pressed, he told us that he felt that we should always understand the work we are going to do before we start it, so the names should be obvious. This was the primary…

May 16, 2012

TDD for C++ Programmers

TDD

It’s official. Your Agile Otter has joined forces with Jeff Langr again, and we will be producing a new Pragmatic Programmers project. This time it’s really a book, not a…

May 12, 2012

Unfair advantages

How much further could your team go if they were to sieze an unfair competitive advantage of backlog grooming, pairing, swapping pair partners, and continuously developing their skills? What if we could do the same thing at other levels of the organization, above the scrum teams?

May 3, 2012

Agile In A Flash - Bias toward testing

testing

TDD

I was surprised to find that Jeff and I have been talking so much about testing over at Agile In A Flash. Jeff and I are quite emphatic about the importance of TDD and…

Apr 25, 2012

Rewards and Performance Revisit

demotivators

management

listicle

motivation

Daniel Pink suggests killing your performance ratings. InfoQ balanced comments pro and con individual rewards. Peter Scholtes says reviews are ineffective, even harmful…

Apr 18, 2012

Retrospectives: What was that about hats, again?

learning organization

retrospective

information radiators

The Pythons struck a fairly deep chord in me with this humorous indictment of human (and particularly American) shallowness. Agile methods are anchored in empirical Inspec…

Apr 16, 2012

Fish Among Kangaroos: A Leadership Failure Tale

motivation

learning organization

demotivators

leadership

The fish, increasingly frustrated, tried all manner of convincing argument. He tried to explain that their way of life would never free them from the solid ground (a mere…

Apr 9, 2012

Really TDD-ing: Less simple than you think

microtests

refactoring

TDD

teams

TDD is a pretty simple system, as popularly described. For an individual doing a kata or playing with some example code it is really just three steps. On card #44 of AgileInAFlash it looks like this:

Apr 2, 2012

The Power of an Agile Mindset

learning

agile

Linda takes us from a negative to a positive affective style, from a posture of seeming or being to one of becoming. There is just so much to know and understand here. If…

Mar 30, 2012

Empathy and Experience: Coaching

agile coach

coaching

You use an experienced coach instead of the nearest guy with a scrum master certificate because you better chance of success when you’re guided by someone who cares, connects, knows the work system, and has been through a few…

Mar 22, 2012

Seem, Be, Become - Choose a path.

There are many kinds of good, and how we approach them tells a lot about us as people. Take Agile for software developers.

Mar 21, 2012

Chickens with a Pig Complex?

teams

teamwork

management

scrum

Famously, scrum has used an old joke to explain two kinds of participants in development work. Pigs and chickens is a reference to having bacon and eggs for breakfast; the chicken is involved (donates an egg), but the pig is committed…

Mar 20, 2012

Evil? You tell me?

coaching

This just in from the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is department: Bob M. hung out a blog post describing the evil that is agile coaching. I didn’t recognize myself in…

Mar 15, 2012

Affording Agile (Emotionally)

pair programming

learning organization

demotivators

agile coach

The idea bubbling under the surface of all of this is that maybe there are entire groups of people who can’t emotionally afford to work in an Agile way. In addition to those who have various social dysfunctions (like my friends with Asperger’s Syndrome or those simply untrained to social forms of work as I was) there are people who suffer from illusory superiority or from imposter syndrome.

Mar 13, 2012

Why not C++ all the time?

Why C++ is not always the best choice, with an explanation credited to Zunino on Stack Overflow.

Jan 19, 2012

Join Fresh Start Week 2012

Soon we’ll be on the other side of Christmas and starting a new year. How about for the first week of January we try doing without copy-and-edit programming. What would…

Dec 6, 2011

Single-Return, AKA: Elephant-proofing your bathtub

Single-entry, single-exit programming was a great breakthrough that led to a serious improvement in the lives of many programmers. In the jurassic period of software development, anyway. In the modern era, among good programmers, I…

Dec 2, 2011

Performance Appraisal Time?

listicle

teams

management

Note: most of you employees do want time with their bosses, they just don’t want a once-a-year backward-looking judgement. They’d rather the boss was a part of their team and gave forward-looking direction all of the time. More feedback…

Dec 1, 2011

Preserving Wasteful Practices

Habit is powerful. People who place symbolic value on the wasteful practice People who have built a reputation on the wasteful practice People who find…

Nov 18, 2011

If We Had Done The Right Thing To Begin With

Architectural decisions are hard to make once-for-all in a system where functionality and platform and development practices change fluidly. A good choice of language…

Oct 28, 2011

What should the well-dressed virtualenv wear?

I’m back to hacking some python (fun stuff!) and have been noting some packages that every well-dressed virtualenv should have. I’m interested in knowing what you use, and for what.

Oct 26, 2011

Mercurial team workflow

teams

This looks fine if you only spend a few minutes in the 2-3-2-3 loop. On the other hand, if you’re in a very busy team and there are refactorings going on (and when…

Oct 5, 2011

The First Puzzle Challenge

retrospective

teamwork

The goal of the challenge was for each team to pick a work style that aided them in getting the greatest number of puzzles completed in a very short time (10 minutes per…

Oct 4, 2011

Python History Visualized

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Sep 30, 2011

Lean Startup and Efficiency

Ries, Eric (2011-09-13). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (p. 19). Crown Business. Kindle…

Sep 27, 2011

Linus Torvalds Management Lessons

management

Torvalds concludes, “Way too many projects seem to think that the code is more important than the user, and they break things left and right, and they don’t apologize for…

Sep 27, 2011

Agile Coaching Camp wrapup

agile coach

agile in a flash

coaching

It was a very net-positive weekend, and I recommend Agile Coaching Camp to all my readers.

Sep 26, 2011

Agile Coach Camp U.S. - Saturday (#accus)

agile coach

agile

coaching

I missed the Friday session. I worked a full day in Des Moines and then drove 11 hours (and into an earlier time zone) overnight. I only arrived this morning at about 4:30…

Sep 24, 2011

The Build is Broken, Now What?

continuous integration

build

testing

teams

We have installed annunciators for teams. Sometimes they are flashing lights, sometimes a glowing orb, sometimes speakers playing a particular noise, sometimes it’s just a…

Sep 21, 2011

Pycon: Examples of Atrocity in Python Programming

python

clean code

failure

naming

A nice discussion about things that should not be done in Python code, but frequently are.

Sep 16, 2011

Ambient Annunciators

continuous integration

information radiators

feedback

build

Our intention is that these sounds, playing through a decent set of speakers, will create an atmosphere of something being “not quite right.” With both systems playing test…

Sep 15, 2011

How Do Scrum Masters Know?

feedback

scrum

scrum master

agile

This time the question is how the scrum masters know if they’re doing a good job. They answered with this short list of feedback mechanisms.

Sep 14, 2011

Learning from bad examples

python

failure

clean code

learning

I saw this in a python tutorial today:

Sep 13, 2011

Scrum Master Duties

scrum master

scrum

teams

This is the result from asking a team of scrum masters what their duties entail.

Sep 12, 2011

You Cannot Possibly Do TDD after Coding

teamwork

TDD

testing

programming

Just for the record: it is flat out impossible to “do the tdd” after the code is finished. This is just a matter of definition. You can write tests after the code is…

Sep 6, 2011

Poop: The Refactoring Method

clean code

testing

refactoring

naming

If I don’t know what to call a method or test initially, the word ‘poop’ reminds me that I need to revisit that code and determine why it is hard to name. Usually…

Aug 30, 2011

Agile2011 Day 4

This was a wonderful, long, crazy day. I woke up with a meditation on my mind. I was feeling calm, happy, centered. Morning routine was a breeze, and the walking route to…

Aug 12, 2011

Agile2011 Day 3

I just can’t get it in my head this was Wednesday. I’m very tired. I’m an introvert, you know, and we draw energy from alone time or time with a small number of close…

Aug 11, 2011

Free, Cheap, Scheduled: retrospective technique

learning organization

retrospective

teams

The team put changes into the correct buckets, and we picked the ones they felt that they had the energy to work on. The scrum master took the task of moving the…

Aug 11, 2011

Agile2011 Day 2

coaching

A lot of today was spent in the Coaches’ Corner, where several more convention-goers were served with expert advice. I spent a chunk of my “alone time” today working on my…

Aug 10, 2011

Pairing Styles

pair programming

teamwork

scrum

agile

Peer pairing is about two people who know what they are doing, who have skills, who are not stuck or lost or confused, designing and implementing ideas as fast as they can.…

Aug 10, 2011

Agile2011 Day 1

coaching

This has been a very good day. I was able to staff the Coaches’ Corner and visit with other coaches when we weren’t engaged with convention-goers. I enjoy the interaction…

Aug 9, 2011

Leadership

leadership

I’m doing some reading and some experiencing, keeping my eyes open for the concept of leadership. One can see leadership as a combination of visibility and confidence.…

Aug 1, 2011

Fun with Squish and Python

testing

At my current gig, we are using Squish to test a new QT-based GUI app. It’s been a hoot. Squish is frameworks, eclipse, and python. Oh, yes, squishy yummy python. To start…

Jul 19, 2011

Microtesting Python Album

microtests

python

TDD

testing

I’m working with Industrial Logic’s newest Python album on microtesting (not yet released) and was lucky enough to get to test out the automated critique. So the way this…

Jun 28, 2011

Short Reach Revived

agile

This first appeared on the Object Mentor blog in 2007, but I had to get a cached copy from google to reread it. I’m reviving it here so we don’t lose it forever. I think it…

Jun 21, 2011

Get Back On Track

pair programming

Things can get you down, so you need to borrow energy from others. Try user groups, pairing, friends, fun programming exercises. Quit thinking you should be able to do…

May 19, 2011

GOing to Software Craftsmanship McHenry County

I was a little overwhelmed with how slowly I’m absorbing information, especially while dealing with household issues (like gas fumes from garage and flooding in basement) on…

May 18, 2011

Chicago Code Camp 2011

I spent the day at Chicago Code Camp. It’s a good thing because it’s a pretty pure conference for programmers. It’s all run by volunteers, all free, all in one day, all short talks (1 hour).

May 16, 2011

Agile Coaching Stories

coaching

If you were on an agile transition, it is likely that your company hired a coach. The coach may have been awesome, may have been horrible, and may even have been me.

May 10, 2011

Adhesion Example

A while back, Glenn Vanderburg wrote an article about software cohesion v. software adhesion. Today I got a great example of adhesion. We are starting our second year in…

May 8, 2011

Organizing Stepwise Considered Harmful

Compare stepwise and subject-wise organization, and the effect each has on understanding related code.

May 6, 2011

Why Not?

I have officially declared 2011 the year of “Why not?” I don’t mean “why not” in the sense of doing anything possible without thinking about it. I’m actually thinking it is…

May 3, 2011

Java’s Greatest Hits And Misses

If you were mentoring someone who is pretty new in java, you would surely tell them about JUnit and your favorite mocking framework and the language grammar. However, you…

Apr 21, 2011

“Managing” Velocity

teams

agile

The term velocity is very well-chosen. It means speed in a certain direction, with the intention that it refers to the teams rate of travel toward a product release. I…

Apr 9, 2011

My OSS Software (inventory)

What I need to replace when I get the new machine: Chrome, Firefox, Midori: Browsers - usually two or more open at one time. gvim, git, svn, poor ole’ cvs: Essentials for…

Apr 4, 2011

Overtime on Agile Teams?

teams

“Predicating project plans on constant overtime is a bad idea.” “Agile requires whole people.” “Overtime is for bumps.” “You have to ask if your overtime is hiding…

Apr 4, 2011

Sell Me A Computer?

I know that’s not the normal set of questions, but that’s why I’m so much fun to shop with. I’ve had great luck with Thinkpads and my Asus EEE PC is just wonderful with…

Apr 2, 2011

Fun times in Honeymoon Mode

I started the new job at Industrial Logic. In addition to receiving online training from my peers here, I’m getting into the source code of our products (some cool stuff in…

Mar 31, 2011

Industrial Logic

Your agile otter has joined Industrial Logic. We have so much in common that it didn’t make sense not to join forces. I will be neck deep in products, courseware, metrics, and all of the other work that makes them so cool. This will be like chocolate and peanut butter, friends. I can’t wait to join all my new best friends!

Mar 25, 2011

Uncle Bob’s Clean Code Video

naming

clean code

The latest Clean Coders video by Uncle Bob Martin covers Chapter 2 of the book Clean Code. This is a chapter that is near to my heart, since it bears my name and Uncle Bob…

Mar 19, 2011

Agile And Beyond Party

Here is the table from Agile And Beyond last weekend. There are a few interesting features here. You can see the cool phones, the notebooks, the Agile In A Flash cards being…

Mar 16, 2011

Make the Retrospective Effective

This triage system worked, and for the next several months we had items in all three categories. No retrospective technique I’ve found will be able to single-handedly…

Mar 16, 2011

Stop hating on the command line

Let’s begin with this simple assertion: command.com sucks. It has always sucked, and always will. Powershell might be nicer, but most people haven’t learned how to use it…

Mar 9, 2011

Python for Everyone At My House

I started teaching my youngest son python years ago. I started him with the turtle package and he drew circles, lines, and squares. He had a great time doing things like…

Mar 8, 2011

A Fun Teamwork Experiment

teams

We would count finished puzzles once per minute per team. We would let the experiment continue until one of the teams finishes its set of puzzles. Publish the findings…

Mar 5, 2011

Stepping up Django Efforts

testing

learning

Today we stepped it up a bit. Jeff Langr and I worked on our little project (shhh! it’s a secret) and spent much of the day in django learning to test things. It cured a…

Mar 4, 2011

Regaining Humility and Thereby Sanity

I got too big for my britches last week and was feeling kinda saucy. I figured that having read a tutorial some time ago should be enough for a smart guy like me, so I…

Mar 2, 2011

COTW: Build Superior Systems With Simple Design

CodeVirtues

Our Card Of The Week from AgileInAFlash is #41 The original article is at the Agile In A Flash blog, and has slightly different wording. We adopted the phrasing from c2.com’…

Mar 1, 2011

Easy flowchart for communicators

communication

I know it’s simple, but why should it not be? Even simple things are hard. Reminder to self: don’t skip three out of four boxes.

Feb 23, 2011

Grandpa Tim Tells A Scary Story

“Grandpa Tim, tell us about the old days.” Grandpa Tim set aside his reading glasses and programming text. “Are you sure, children? It’s nearly bed time. Maybe a story…

Feb 21, 2011

Agile Otter Receives Love

I thank you for the kind words. The Linked-in recommendations are always appreciated and always useful. Hopefully we can add in a few recommendations for the books as well.

Feb 18, 2011

Self-Promotion and Resume-writing

If my former CIO says this about me (as one indeed did, word-for-word), it sounds positively inspiring. But imagine I was sitting down with you, and said the same things…

Feb 16, 2011

The Wicks

teams

The question asked was what is the best we can do, then? I suggest that every programming team that isn’t burning brightly needs a few burning wicks added. This infusion of…

Feb 14, 2011

4 Questions Film Project

You can make a 60-second (or less) film, answering these questions (or a subset thereof) for our collection. We hope to impact decision-making among young people, encouraging them to enter the software craft.

Feb 10, 2011

The Great Giveaway Begins

agile in a flash

They’re here! Now that I have extra decks of Agile In A Flash, I want to give them away in person as a door prize or in a contest of some sort. The problem is that I’m…

Feb 3, 2011

World’s Shortest Agile Summary

ottinger

agile

teams

Do small things supremely well, and let them add up to large things. Use feedback to steer to the results you want. Defeat problems with teamwork. Maintain an even…

Feb 3, 2011

Discoveries of the Week

This week I made some social networking advancements and started to build a few other new skills. The first is Tweet Feed which is likely responsible for you seeing this…

Jan 28, 2011

Pairing, Competence, and Recognition

learning

pair programming

teamwork

It’s a common thread in agile transitions that people are not sure what pairing, teamwork, and self-organization will do to their status on the team. Will the team be so…

Jan 28, 2011

One Video Wrapped Up

I have our first video finished. Notice how my face never appeared. I’m going to have to get used to hearing my voice on these, maybe I’ll do the full-frontal face thing in one of the future videos. Either way, we now have a commercial that explains what this whole Agile In A Flash thing is about.

Jan 25, 2011

Agile In A Flash

listicle

Prag Prog Amazon O’Reilly Borders Buy.Com Deep Discount E Campus

Jan 20, 2011

Django Unit Test Hobby

testing

I have played with Django, but never really did any work in it. Even my toy app died before I got to a “good working model” state with it, because I did not maintain focus…

Jan 20, 2011

Remote Pairing Matters

pair programming

The one thing I haven’t said about my time as a remote pair programmer is that remote pair programming is a brilliant idea and it matters. The reason I didn’t mention it…

Jan 20, 2011

Observation on Growing Disconnected

People, software, and organizations often grow in this way: they accumulate without assimilating, and aggregate without integrating. As a result, they tend to be…

Jan 15, 2011

Reflecting on Being Employed as a Remote Pair Programmer

teams

Being a telecommuter or remote team member is considered a pretty sweet deal and is recognized as a more “green” way of working. Remotes don’t share illnesses with their…

Jan 15, 2011

Software Talent Agency?

I had some thoughts cross my mind today, and wanted to write them down before they fade. I’m of some reputation in the agile community, a sometimes-recognized author, a…

Jan 13, 2011

About “Under Test”

testing

I wrote earlier about code being under test, and how advantageous to have a test under several layers of testing. As I was looking through my old google docs, I found this drawing I’d made to explain layers of testing in a web app.

Jan 7, 2011

Want Your Own Agile Otter?

This is a limited time offer. If you would like to have The Agile Otter working for you, this might be your chance.

Jan 5, 2011

Explaining What I Do For A Living

I think it is a great answer. We don’t type for a living, we understand, reason, mentally try different solutions, hypothesize, disprove, reason, and invent. If we already…

Dec 28, 2010

Where’s Tim

I’ve been quite busy of late, partly with holiday season, partly with medical matters (wife’s ankle surgery), partly with church, partly with Agile In A Flash, and partly…

Dec 13, 2010

Under Test

testing

Today I was thinking about the phrase “under test” as in “we’ve got to get this code under test so we can fix it.” I started of thinking about the way the app we were…

Nov 4, 2010

C# Curiously Nested Production Class

So here we have the derived class nested in its base class. I am quite comfortable with nested anythings in python or a few other languages, so that’s not a problem. I nest…

Oct 12, 2010

Explaining Refactoring

refactoring

Of course the product manager is right about the risk of large-scale refactorings and also about the lack of end-user value from effective efforts. What is missing is an…

Oct 9, 2010

Heatmap: The new hotness

I had some fun recently after agonizing over the problem of bug prevention. I put out the observation that bugs have a tendency to cluster, and that the more often code is edited the greater the need for the code to be frightfully…

Oct 9, 2010

Tests Are Code

testing

I write an automated acceptance test (AT) and I find that I would like to perform certain actions against the business objects. I create a method on the business objects…

Oct 1, 2010

Pair Switching Degrades over Time

We had a nice talk today about the natural foot-dragging that is common among pair programmers when it comes time to switch partners.

Sep 10, 2010

Where is the Agile Otter?

I’ve been developing new skills, and working with Jeff on the AgileInAFlash project. What’s new? Our latest article for Pragmatic Programmers.

Sep 1, 2010

Copy And Edit Revisited

I’ve previously ranted about the ill-effects of copy-paste-edit programming, but it would be unfair to say that there is never a need for it, or that people who did it were simply stupid and lazy. The problem would not be so prevalent if it did not have some reasonable basis for practice. However well-intentioned and useful it is, its net effect on a code base is overwhelming negative.

Jul 16, 2010

Stop Playing Catch And Release In Quadrant 4.

Quadrant 1 (tested, perfect) code is as good as it gets. Q1 code is blameless. Though the system around it may misbehave and cause ill effects, Q1 code does the best…

Jul 9, 2010

Two Year In, Looking for the Goodies

management

This week I wrote a useful utility and taught some Python to a peer, attended a really great work session and a rough estimating session. I did some WIP management…

Jun 25, 2010

Do You Want Us To Think Or Not?

teams

learning

To make software, you need people who are skilled, creative, quick-learning, thoughtful, and engaged. You might be able to skimp on ‘skilled’ if the rest of your team…

Jun 23, 2010

Meddling, Oversight, and Agile, Oh My!

agile coach

failure

agile manager

teams

My experience is that the less well a team has done in the past, the more oversight is piled on, and that oversight reaches higher and higher levels. There really is no…

Jun 18, 2010

Only Quality Matters

flow

If your code doesn’t really work, then it doesn’t matter how quickly you wrote it. Abandoning quality in pursuit of speed is a fool’s errand. It has been discussed plenty…

Jun 18, 2010

Software Like Building A House

If it takes six months to build a house, then 85 percent of the time is spent on two activities: waiting on the next trade to show up and fixing mistakes. Clemson’s…

Jun 15, 2010

Your Reward System Doesn’t Work

motivation

Presented in the most pleasant way possible, by Daniel Pink & friends: The whole “purpose maximizers” thing gives me hope in ways that “enlightened self interest” never…

Jun 10, 2010

Mocking Done Badly

testing

I do have to wonder if they have any real value other than cementing the code’s current implementation into the test suite. If we extract a method or inline a method, I…

May 11, 2010

Making Stuff is Making Stuff

On the television as I type this is a show called “Amazing Wedding Cakes”, which is unsurprisingly about cake making. In the current episode a bride has ordered 190…

May 2, 2010

Linear and Radial Progress: Take The Next Step

CodeVirtues

refactoring

clean code

agile

Today we didn’t make a lot of linear progress I think of quality in two ways. One is the product quality that users perceive, and the other is the habitability of the…

Apr 29, 2010

Accept changes, not interruptions.

We say “embrace change” and “accept changes to requirements, even late in the process.” We also rant about focus and that developers should neither be interrupted nor allowed to multitask. To a lot of people, this sounds just like a contradiction. Are we hypocrites?

Apr 28, 2010

Be Careful What You Fix

I know that’s silly, but I am recreating from an old memory, and I remember the code having some silly uses of null & the like. I remember noticing right away that if a…

Apr 16, 2010

Full Test Access With Data Hiding for Production

testing

I’m talking to users of statically-typed languages today. Functional and dynamic language people, cut them some slack and realize I’m not talking to you. Breaking with…

Mar 19, 2010

Even simplified, it can be daunting

FIRST

testing

learning

SOLID design FIRST-rate tests Virtuous code I understand the “just get it done mindset” because there is a lot of learning, thinking, and doing behind those three simple links.…

Mar 12, 2010

When The Test Goes Green

testing

DateTime date = DateTime.Parse(datestring);

Mar 10, 2010

Motivational Speech

motivation

teams

communication

My problem is with the absurdist version of the story: the mythical team that is filled with execution issues, poor teamwork, low degree of individual skill, and an enemy…

Mar 8, 2010

Code is not a Car

If a man was to borrow his his boss’ car, drive it hard, fast and carelessly, and then return it with the interior filthy and ripped up, he would probably get fired (or be…

Mar 4, 2010

Career Pathing?

I know that companies have the best intentions. They want to provide opportunity for their employees in hopes of retaining them and encouraging desirable behaviors. They want to reward those who perform well and eliminate the dead wood. Even so, it is 2010 and career pathing is done, like annual reviews is done, like the 80s are done. This is doubly true for agile organizations where the dynamics are so very different.

Feb 27, 2010

The snowball

testing

So Scott and I are pair-programming, when we realize that there is code in our test setup that ought to be in the model. We look and find that it’s not, but it is duplicated…

Feb 25, 2010

Survey Frustrations

teams

Via AgileVoices, I found a a survey that asks all the wrong questions. On the first page, it asked me for my role in the agile team. I selected “other” and typed “member”…

Feb 24, 2010

Simple V. Clear V. Easy V. Primitive

The problem I realized is that “simple” gets mixed up with “easy”, “primitive”, and “clear” in ways most unfortunate. This was true of myself as well as others in the conversation.

Feb 22, 2010

The Problem Of Copying

TDD

refactoring

productivity

Many programmers see their jobs as a process of gluing together code fragments to make things work. Many of them produce results very quickly and are lauded for productivity. TDD, mocking libraries, dependency injection, and refactoring…

Feb 9, 2010

Code #region considered harmful

I simply hate #regions. Apparently I’m not alone. In C#, a bit of code surrounded in #region…#endregion markers is folded shut by any decent IDE. The code becomes invisible…

Jan 28, 2010

Name it Badly

naming

If you cannot name something well, then please name it appallingly badly. No, this is not a joke about the iPad. When I am stuck for a name, the problem usually not my…

Jan 28, 2010

Easy to Use

I’m working in multiple tools and languages lately. It set me to thinking about what makes one better or worse than another. About the same time, I see a lot of mentions of…

Dec 31, 2009

Pauses

An astute reader might notice that all my blogs are currently languishing. There are reasons for this, from my father’s massive stroke to my continually-delayed house closing, to other crises in my family (biological and ecclesiastic) that have my attention though there is little I can do about any of these things.

Dec 14, 2009

A Waste Of Vertical Space

clean code

I think we gain readability by deleting 15 lines of fluff and reducing the namespace pollution by half. The operations group more naturally, so I don’t have to remember to…

Dec 4, 2009

Tech Upgrades for The New Year

I am replacing my old, dying laptop with a NoteBook (ASUS Eee PC 1005MA) but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I need to upgrade my tech skills . It is time for me to go…

Dec 4, 2009

Gratuitous Context

naming

I have been working on code that oscillates between cryptic abbreviations and absurdly long names in functions. Sadly, I cannot reproduce it here for you, or I would. The…

Nov 17, 2009

Factors Driving Naming

naming

Code that is hard/slow to understand is hard/slow to change reliably. When we use better (not just longer) names, we find our code can be easier for others to understand.

Oct 23, 2009

Code That Makes You Feel Good

There are clever code constructs in the world. Some of them are quite useful in the right circumstances. Some, like Duff’s device or the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern …

Oct 20, 2009

Sorry Way to do Business

I have been thinking a lot about Esther Derby’s work on performance assessments and wanted to jot this down. Competition is a good thing when it pushes people forward, but…

Oct 14, 2009

The Fast Food Chicken Dilemma

Let’s say you are working in a fast-food restaurant that is attempting to keep up with Chick-Fil-A and KFC and Brown’s Fried Chicken. Speed and quality are important, but…

Oct 6, 2009

Define Leadership for Me

leadership

This week in Twitter, @marick brought up questions about the meaning and nature of leadership also. Now I can’t escape the meme rattling around in the back of my head. It’s a bit like when you have three bars of a song in your head and it won’t stop repeating until you hear the song in its entirety. What is leadership? It is clearly a kind of skillfulness, but what skill is it? What set of skills define leadership?

Oct 3, 2009

Tragedy of the Doubtful Solution

Straighten out the begin/end so you don’t need a Cartesian explosion of if statements, and then look at the ranges. When either range ends before the other starts, there is…

Sep 29, 2009

The main thing you need to know:

(kudos to Cory Haines who, I think, owns the image).

Sep 25, 2009

The Elusive Code Quality Argument

refactoring

clean code

If some programmers can’t tell clean code from messy code, most managers cannot tell, and most sales and product people can’t tell, and if the benefits of refactoring trail…

Sep 22, 2009

Becoming More Useful

This is an article about writing articles. I get to relearn lessons from time to time. An example is the discussion that went on behind the scenes while producing the Stop…

Sep 10, 2009

Software is not to blame

safety

See the rest of the content at Six Dirty Tricks at ZDNet. The context is in dirty tricks pulled by vendors that cause software engagements to fail (perhaps in a profitable…

Sep 10, 2009

Reports from the Field

A friend of mine told me that his company is doing an agile project for integrating some systems. They’ve already had a few deployments, and their bug count is below 1/10th the expected level. Ahhh. That’s how it’s done.

Sep 8, 2009

Trainwreck Removal

Astute readers will realize that this is the Law of Demeter at work. Advanced students may note that the public method is in the wrong class now. It doesn’t use any local…

Sep 8, 2009

Definition of Expert

An expert knows three things of great value: 1) What all the mistakes look like. 2) That they are mistakes. 3) That you don’t have to make them.

Sep 4, 2009

Culture-Specific Tests After a Fresh Checkout

management

Now the interesting questions are what you would do, and what your development manager would like you to do, and what the Customer would like you to do. Discuss among…

Aug 31, 2009

Agile is a Management Trick

management

Historically, none is strictly true. But I think they’re all true. I will welcome your feedback, as always.

Aug 31, 2009

Backsliding From Agile to Waterfall

This is the place for you to regale me with stories of backslides . I am interested in how it happened as well as your guesses as to why. Is agile too counterintuitive? Does…

Aug 29, 2009

Long and Short of Naming

naming

The point of good naming is not to make the names long but to make them clear and obvious.

Aug 29, 2009

40 Hours is Unprofessional

Does that cover it?

Aug 27, 2009

Avoiding Negative Tim

It’s not just a good idea for you, it’s a better idea for me. I admit to being a little run down from my last nine days of activity (college for son, travel, etc) and also…

Aug 25, 2009

The Bottom Of The V?

management

It is backlog management. Everyone is talking about “value” and “maximizing the work not done” and “minimal marketable features” and “prioritizing.” I’ve been thinking for…

Aug 25, 2009

Platitudes Of Doom

motivation

productivity

Here’s where I suspect things go wrong. I see a combination of two ideas at the core of a lot of corporate dysfunction. I can want things faster than you can build them. …

Aug 25, 2009

Going Faster

productivity

It seems obvious that you can go faster if you take longer strides and cut corners. In software, this is very much false. Be advised.

Aug 21, 2009

Don’t Geocache Your Variables

testing

refactoring

naming

Coupling is not so good because it frustrates testing and refactoring. The places where a change is made and where the change causes a failure are not very close together.…

Aug 18, 2009

How Big is a Story Point?

Noob asks: “How much is a story point?” Master looks on card wall, says: “We do 16 each week.” Noob asks: “But how much work is it?” Master says: “One sixteenth of a week right…

Aug 18, 2009

Beany Objects and Busy Code-Behinds

If we violate the first two rules, we necessarily violate the final rule, or cause it to be violated by our peers. If they cannot find or cannot separate the code they want…

Aug 15, 2009

Odd Function Signature

Notice anything funny? A setter method that takes no parameters, so there’s nothing to set, and returns a list of some sort. Hmmm… Did the author mean “GetSomeAttribute”…

Aug 15, 2009

Beany Classes and Busy Methods

You know you’re in trouble in hardly more than a glance. All the methods are long and busy, and do their work data members of other classes… other classes without any…

Aug 10, 2009

Any Road To Rome is Also A Road From Rome

refactoring

I’m back (with my partner) working on the same stinky stuff I blogged about earlier. That code all made it back to the main codeline where we can refactor it but we had to…

Aug 6, 2009

A Good Windows Experience?

I have had at least two people tell me that windows works very smoothly for them, and that it handles whatever they need to do with it. I’ve been programming since long…

Jul 31, 2009

Naming or Comment Fail?

naming

A method comment explains that ReadSessions adds sessions within a specified date-time range.

Jul 22, 2009

The U Controversy

clean code

agile

teamwork

naming

It is a tempest in a teakettle, to be sure, but among the points of friction and discovery today was one about the use of the letter ‘u’ as a variable name. The case in…

Jul 9, 2009

Code Perturbation and Extensive Branch Mods

clean code

refactoring

version control

The problem with perturbation is that it makes it hard to maintain branches. Branched development is a good thing sometimes, providing some isolation for a very short period of time, and some ability to compose and recompose a release. Branching becomes odious, however, when the code in a branch differs greatly from the code in a shared codeline (often trunk). Merging becomes difficult, manual, and fraught with error.

Jun 29, 2009

Anti-IF Campaign

The Anti-IF Campaign: an invitation to rethink conditional-heavy code.

Jun 25, 2009

Not Fitting In An Iteration

I was commenting to a pair partner (Hi, Nick) the other day that we should have worked out a way to get this thing out in iteration-sized buckets. As soon as I said it I realized that we would have, had we known that the finished result was going to look like it does now/so-far.

Jun 19, 2009

Preferences On Code Style

Please help me read your code. I know you don’t owe me anything, and you can run your code even if it doesn’t pass the Agile Otter Sniff Test. I appreciate all of that. But I think that you and I can both do a better job if we’re just up-front about things.

Jun 19, 2009

svn and patches don’t mix

I only mention this because I’ve had a recent hiney bite in the combination of patch and svn.

Jun 19, 2009

SVN fail most sighted

Now, how is it a conflict that I added a line of code and trunk didn’t? I will freely admit that the diffing stuff is very smart and not very easy. I want to cut a lot of…

Jun 19, 2009

Culture of Blame

safety

Sometimes you read an article and realize, “Hey! I’ve been there!”. I was following some tweets the other day and was directed to an article on The Blame Game, which…

Jun 16, 2009

My Story Board is The Same As Yours!

I saw a recent article describing one team’s use of a Story board. I mention it here, because it’s the same way I’ve set up the last two. Love it or hate it, it’s also what I’ve been doing.

Jun 3, 2009

Customer/Vendor Relationship outside of IT

A video about customer and vendor relationships outside the world of IT.

Jun 2, 2009

Symmetry and Simplicity on a Monday

I just watched an Ira Glass video about taste and sticking with your work, and practicing. Of course, any attempt to compare myself to Glass will end in disappointment for me. …

Jun 2, 2009

Because the biggest single determinant in today’s production is the quality of yesterday’s production.

TDD

pair programming

Mike Hill discusses How TDD and Pairing Increase Production, and he is right. Today, two of us have been working, and have made progress, but the reality of the situation is…

May 26, 2009

Esther Derby Promotes Plain, Honest Speaking

She (rightfully) hates the sandwich technique, where you build your criticism into a protective fog, to keep your colleague from feeling like you have criticized him. Which…

May 7, 2009

Top-down/Bottom-up

TDD

I always find I do a better job if I top-down my tdd work. I have a good context, goals are clearer, and the strategy doesn’t get lost in the tactical work. It’s such a good…

May 7, 2009

Whiteboard

A friend just pointed me to twiddla as an online whiteboard for remote collaboration between friends and colleagues. I diverted a little time from work and went there this morning for about 15 minutes. Looks like it could work just fine.

May 1, 2009

XP Born in Frustration

I guess sometimes it’s good to be ‘fired’ from a gig. I bet he’s happier now than he would ever have been there. This is the kind of moral tale that makes history so engaging.

May 1, 2009

Another C word (Convenience)

I have fallen victim to this. Rather than trudge through the code to make something explicit, we looked for the most convenient point of code insertion. Even while my…

Apr 30, 2009

Velocity

Another purpose of measuring capacity is to improve throughput. If you plan for less than your capacity, you get less done than you could have. If you plan for more than…

Apr 30, 2009

Rethinking The C Word (clever)

When I say “clever” I am referring to misspent ingenuity. It is intelligence gone wrong. I don’t know a good word that says “unwanted, wasteful, vulgar ingenuity”. My friend…

Apr 27, 2009

Cool TDD Antipatterns Appearance on Stack Overflow

TDD

There is a cool outgrowth from James Carr’s collaborative paper on TDD Antipatterns. There is a Stack Overflow article where you can vote to determine the most prevalent of…

Apr 25, 2009

Calculate the cost of a priority mistake

If you want an estimate of the cost of making a bad prioritization decision, try this cute little calculator.

Apr 24, 2009

“Clever”

Think about how you would have written this two-bool operation. Laugh with me.

Apr 24, 2009

Code Patching in Legacy Messes

I really don’t want to make this sound like a big deal. The whole thing happens in less than a week and really only affects a handful of files. Nonetheless we went through the gamut of emotions common to maintaining ugly code, and used a range of tools common to trying to do a craftsmanlike job in a legacy code base. Even with a small task, it can be a challenge to stay engaged and positive.

Apr 24, 2009

Remote Pairing with YuuGuu

pair programming

Our office firewall gets in the way of Yuuguu, probably by blocking UDP traffic I’m not sure what the real . Finally a coworker was WFH and we were able to try it. Hey, it…

Apr 23, 2009

You Win Some, You Lose Some

pair programming

My talk on remote pairing with Tim Gifford was accepted for Agile 2009. My talk on the In A Flash cards was not. Ah, well, ya don’t win them all. See you for some of the…

Apr 23, 2009

Shhhh.. busy!

I’m not typing a lot of blog this week. I’m typing more web searches and notes and stuff. I’m learning more about memcachd and tuplespaces and couchdb and DVCS, hanging with the offspring, and cleaning code. It’s a busy time and I’m learning much. Hopefully I’ll be contributing at least as much. We’ll see.

Apr 15, 2009

Remote Pairing Month 3

pair programming

Overall, this is not a bad process. When we’re truly engaged and the bandwidth is good, and we don’t have the same partner too long, it’s a very workable arrangement.…

Apr 7, 2009

Mercurial Branching

It’s easy to do local branching in mercurial. My partner was exploring it for the first time and asked if this was supported in mercurial since it was supported in git. I…

Mar 31, 2009

Find Users of method through inheritor

So you have a method defined on an abstract base class, and you are going be messing with it. Someone decided to hang a deep inheritance hierarchy (deep to me means three…

Mar 24, 2009

New Upgrade

Today we had a little upgrade to our internet access. We went ahead and moved from Vonage to Comcast for phone service, and included in the upgrade were a few cable channels…

Mar 24, 2009

Caring About Stupid Stuff

A clear sign of a sick workspace is when people care far too much about stupid stuff, as reported at Tech Dark Side by David Christiansen. Nicely done.

Mar 23, 2009

Contractor or Consultant?

Reference: CIO Matthew Edwards’ blog entry.

Mar 23, 2009

First glance: SPE and TDD

TDD

SPE is a pretty nice python editor. I’m using Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex’s default version (0.8.4) and have had pretty good results most of the time. It has nice features like…

Mar 20, 2009

Power Of Naming

naming

clean code

This is from a moderately recent copy of my Meaningful Names paper, and was translated into Java in the book Clean Code. Here it is in original context with python code…

Mar 20, 2009

Do the Right Thing and Get It Done

Practice - Corey Haines from 8th Light on Vimeo. Looking good, Paul P. Rock on, Corey.

Mar 19, 2009

Probably something stupid…

This came about today, because we forgot to put a “virtual” on a method we were mocking. We’ve done this many many dozens of times in the past few weeks, but it’s a manual…

Mar 19, 2009

Article about readability of exception test

testing

clean code

Readability and exceptions article by Bill Venners is worth a gander. I think his solution is elegant because it’s obvious and terse. I love obvious and terse.

Mar 19, 2009

Windows wants to reboot

Sheesh. I’m trying to participate in a webex conference call, and windows wants to update. Then it wants to reboot. No, no, no. I have to get my cursor back from webex and…

Mar 19, 2009

Web Cams

People told me that eventually Linux would bite me in the butt. I went a long time without that being true, or never being true in any serious way. I figured when it…

Mar 18, 2009

Prioritization

The Ryan Martens article on prioritizing is worth your time. Go read it right now.

Mar 13, 2009

Clean Code Clarification

clean code

Read on its own, this makes it sound like I (or the editors) think “Manager”, “Processor”, “Data”, and “Info” are verbs. Not so. Just an unwanted effect of editing. This is…

Mar 12, 2009

Bounce Rates

It’s a funny thing, but “bounce rates” at Agile In A Flash make me happy. According to google analytics, the “bounce rate” is the percentage of single-page visits. In the…

Mar 11, 2009

“called from” boolean variables considered ugly

naming

class EvilPoliticalRobotDouble: Minion { … public void runForElection(Person replicatedPerson, bool CalledFromRNC=false) { … } }

Mar 11, 2009

Three Rules for Code Comments

If we believe a comment is necessary, we examine it in the context of the code. Can we apply the Single Truth Rule to make the comment redundant (often via “extract method”…

Mar 11, 2009

Remote Pairing Requires Headsets

pair programming

When not in group meetings, remote pairing requires headsets on the in-house side. Otherwise, the voices of the partner tends to be no louder than the voices in the bullpen.…

Mar 11, 2009

Networking problem solved

This greeted me this morning with the cheery news that my network is not sick anymore.

Mar 9, 2009

Skype today

New tip: Skype is more or less half-duplex so noise being picked up by the microphone affects your ability to listen to your remote partner. Adjust your audio settings.…

Mar 9, 2009

Conference Calls and Remote Team Members

teams

Today was a mixed bag. My code was surprisingly more performant than I expected once we moved a save point. The database handled my subselects better than I expected. I…

Mar 6, 2009

Gizmo5

Today we realized that google voice & video was eating my laptop cpu. It’s great, but a bit piggy. By the time you load up resharper, visual stupido and a good sized app…

Mar 6, 2009

XCopy still works

Just so we all can remember (or find) this later: xcopy in windows has a /Z option to resume in case a file transfer fails. For you WFH types who are stuck in windows, you might save a lot of trouble by using this flag when moving from your remote office server/nas/workstation to home computer over vpn. This is especially useful if the network is spotty.

Mar 5, 2009

Home Networking

pair programming

I wish I’d paid more attention to my home network before getting into this. I will continue the home pairing, but I really do need to have this stuff rock-solid.If you want…

Mar 4, 2009

Continuing remote pairing & SQL testing

testing

pair programming

This week has had a lot of network issues. We’ve temporarily gone voice-only to reduce our bandwidth. We’re screen-sharing and voice chatting and hoping for the best.…

Mar 3, 2009

Stack Overflow #41

Oh, hey! I got a small mention in Stack Overflow Podcast #41. It was a quick mixed reference to my Object Mentor blog entries Curly’s Guide To Software and Outliving the…

Feb 27, 2009

Global Variables

naming

Know what I hate about global variables? Besides “everything”, I mean? Seed And Harvest is evil. Globals propagate the seed-and-harvest idea which makes the existence of…

Feb 26, 2009

More Remote Pairing

pair programming

Some days it is a struggle. My network disconnected and reconnected a few times. That made me lose my session and have to restart. We determined the dark background that looks…

Feb 26, 2009

Remote Pairing Day 3

pair programming

Pairing from my house, using my broadband today. Took extra time to get set up, because I didn’t have an office all squared away. Not yet. We’re working on it. Today it’s…

Feb 25, 2009

Remote Pairing Day 2

pair programming

I would most love to add “works for Linux or Windows” to that, but that’s not strictly required. I’m doing windows-only this week, and we can run putty or msys for text-mode…

Feb 24, 2009

Agile via Sound Bites

teams

There was a long, multiparty discussion on the XP mailing list recently. A fellow was struggling with some issues about self-managed teams and taking direction from the…

Feb 18, 2009

Pork Barrel Agile Failure

ottinger

agile

So here is a failure mode I finally had time to think about. I saw a version of this play out, but here’s the basic idea: The Customer doesn’t get as many stories as he’d…

Feb 18, 2009

Clean code: Writing Functions

clean code

Uncle Bob writes an awful lot of code. Not all of it is in his Git repository, because he is also a consultant/coach and writes code for his customers. Here he describes the…

Feb 12, 2009

The SOLID principles as motivational posters.

motivation

I want a full set of SOLID motivational posters for every client, employer, and beloved code influence in my life.

Feb 12, 2009

On python not scaling well

Python does not scale? EVE Online offers a rather large counterexample.

Feb 9, 2009

Coding your way out of Fear Of Change

safety

That’s nice for green-field development, but what about the rest of us? If you are already in trouble, you have a long road ahead of you. You should get a copy of Michael…

Feb 6, 2009

Code Doesn’t Lie

python

clean code

programming

learning

I’m learning my way through Pylons, which really is very simple (so far) but the tutorials are all wrong in different ways. Even different versions of the same one. One will…

Feb 3, 2009

Looking for interesting work

I’m currently looking for some interesting work in northeast Illinois or southeastern Wisconsin, or possibly some minimal travel + work-from-home. If you know of some good…

Feb 2, 2009

Bash coolness

And of course the coolest version is the (() operator (AKA: command substitution), which used to be done with ugly backticks. This runs a command and returns the output of…

Jan 27, 2009

Fear of Changing Code

refactoring

clean code

technical debt

safety

This is why managers and indeed whole organizations want to tighten down on development, and demand minimal work though it brings minimal satisfaction. This dissatisfaction…

Jan 24, 2009

James Grenning boils it down

clean code

From the XP mailing list, James Grenning has this to offer: > There are two values to software > 1) Business value delivered > 2) Ease at which the next important feature can…

Jan 24, 2009

Shameful Confessions from a small Solo Project

I had a small task to build a subversion post-commit trigger. I didn’t know my way around the subversion library, and so I started spiking… the old way. I fired up an…

Jan 20, 2009

Esther Derby on Motivation and Demotivators

demotivators

motivation

teams

I’m becoming an Esther Derby fan, partly because of her statements about employee motivation and demotivators.. I became acquainted with her work through anagile toolkit…

Jan 19, 2009

Opposite of Despair…

agile

pair programming

… is “pair”. Just had a good pairing session. Our result is small and simple, probably not enough to justify our time if you counted lines of code, but involved lots of…

Jan 8, 2009

Quick Status

teams

These really seem to be the right high-value things for us to work on. Customer involvement is up. Each team has direct contact with the people who will benefit from the…

Jan 8, 2009

XPairTise problem or am I just being dense?

pair programming

The XPairTise Eclipse plugin is supposed to enable remote pairing, but the server is hard-coded to use “tcp://localhost:61616”. Localhost? How am I supposed to do remote pair…

Jan 5, 2009

Quality Rant

Men more brilliant than ourselves have tried for decades to get the idea of quality across to businesspeople and tradespeople (including software craftsmen) and have had only very limited success.

Dec 31, 2008

Put simply

testing

teams

What I believe about software development in simple terms: If your team will not pair AND test, if your Customer will not prioritize, if your customer and developers will not…

Dec 29, 2008

Opportunity Cost & Priority

teams

If you have a fixed number of resources, then the only way the team can take on a large new story is by not doing an equivalent amount of previously-assigned work. If the…

Dec 13, 2008

All Together Now!

teams

coaching

Today I was in a meeting that made me smile. When I came to this team four months ago (Aug 4th) and took up the agile coach role, I talked about changing how they did ATs.…

Dec 12, 2008

Raspberry Jam

agile

teams

I find that when I allow myself or my team to be overwhelmed with tasks, we lose all effectiveness to get any of them done. I have vowed to never interrupt a task in…

Dec 11, 2008

Save Your Project

flow

teams

When I see teams in trouble, the hardest things to teach are these. Prioritizing means that you have to declare something more important (or at least more urgent) than…

Dec 6, 2008

Trickle Effect and Project Publicity

I have to be a little worried about the trickle effect, as it was described to me by my Andrew Cohen (boss and mentor) today. Since moving to Agile, the group produces small…

Dec 5, 2008

The “D” Word

The agile value of the day is Discipline, the D word. With it we avoid being overwhelmed, snarled, and demotivated. Without it, nothing goes well. Here are my top 8 items in the “fruit of the agile spirit”:

Dec 2, 2008

Doing Python Wrong

python

Mike Pirnat found a snippet of python code. I can only suppose it was written as a joke. Python is such a readable language left in something approaching a “natural” state.…

Dec 2, 2008

Unit Test Ice Breakers

testing

So you’re looking at this pre-existing code. You aren’t sure what to do with it, but you need to get some unit tests going. What do you do when you get stuck.

Dec 2, 2008

Where we are.

teams

The new team is great. We’ve put some extreme measures in place, but we’re getting some focus on getting real completion. To deal with the huge QA backlog, we have devoted…

Dec 2, 2008

Extreme Measures

teams

Sometimes one has to take some extreme measures to help a team over the hump in their agile transition. It is hard to adjust work habits without having a work environment…

Nov 5, 2008

Python Pimpl Pattern

python

A classic unit test blunder is to make use of the system time freely in your code. Another blunder is to monkey-patch your preferred time function.

Nov 5, 2008

Acceptance Test Qualities

testing

This list is intended as a small set of reminders, so that when one is in the midst of a project, one might find some guidance. Is the test really fit for use as…

Nov 4, 2008

Agile Progress and Branching

agile

version control

testing

This week, and last, we are doing our work in the release candidate (RC) branch, which will eventually be merged to trunk. We maintain a “stable trunk” system, with the RC…

Nov 3, 2008

Branching

teams

The team I have been working with has been reporting a surprising amount of time on merging forward branches, merging them to a RC, and dealing with merges that were not…

Oct 20, 2008

START

learning

RandsInRepose writes the best article I’ve seen in a long time. I am also daunted by large tasks, and especially large learning tasks. Even large drudgery tasks can give me…

Oct 8, 2008

Branching as a Coping Mechanism

agile

version control

Branching is a coping mechanism. There is a lot of branching and release-time cherry-picking of features in the commercial software world. It seems to alleviate some pain and…

Oct 7, 2008

Transformation by Obviating Coping Mechanisms

When faced with ugly code I learned a simple pattern. First I would break the code into paragraphs and comment it liberally. Since I hate code that requires comments, my…

Oct 7, 2008

Move from ObjectMentor

agile coach

agile manager

coaching

On Aug 4, 2008 I moved from Object Mentor where I was an Agile coach and mentor to various companies to Textura where I have been an internal coach and now am managing a…

Oct 6, 2008

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