CR Linefeed

One of the other sites I post to is the blog for my book group The Oxtremists. We meet up monthly in a pub to discuss a book usually related in some way to agile software development – nothing too exciting. So I was surprised to find that someone who revels in the [...]

Rachel Davies questions the use of the term “Refactoring” and suggests that it is confusing to business people. She suggests the term “Tidying up” instead. While I like this, I can see a possibility that those business people might now think it is not very important. I think it should be considered [...]

I went to XPDay in London last week. My thoughts are recorded at my work blog split into Day 1 and Day 2 respectively.

I read a fair few blog articles out there on the subject of software development. It isn’t often that I read one that makes me mutter to myself “what are you talking about?”. This is one of those articles. In it, Glen Alleman states
the net effort to deliver the project is [...]

I’ve started a book group for anyone in the Oxford area who’d like to meet up and talk about agile software development. There’s a blog-based website and a Yahoo group to help spread the word.
The first meeting is at “Far from the Madding Crowd” on 3 May 2006 at 8pm. We’ll be discussing [...]

I’ve started reading “Agile Software Development” by Alistair Cockburn. I haven’t had the time to get very far as yet, but I do like the way he analyzes software development as a game (that’s game as in Game Theory). He characterizes it as a co-operative game of invention and communication. He also [...]

I’ve been reading Getting Things Done (GTD), just because of all the stuff I’ve seen written about it all over the web. To explain briefly, it’s about techniques to get yourself in control of all the things you need to do in your life, both professionally and personally. Being very interested in all things agile, [...]

I’m still only half way through The White Book v2 but something has struck me. Whenever Kent Beck comes up with an anecdote about a real project that had problems, it seems that it usually ends with “…unfortunately I couldn’t convince them to…”. Am I just imagining this? If he can see problems, but can’t [...]

So it seems that Kent Beck has completely replaced the concept of “Velocity” with the idea of a “Budget” in XP version 2. I think this is an attempt to speak in language that business people will understand. To be honest though, it seems that even technical people have difficulty with this word too. [...]

Only a little way into “The White Book” (see previous post) and already there are some nice quotable nuggets. I like this particularly:
It’s not my job to “manage” someone else’s expectations. It’s their job to manage their expectations. It’s my job to do my best and to communicate clearly.
As usual, Kent Beck takes the [...]