Overview of Agile Software Development http://www.agilekiwi.com/ en-NZ Copyright (c) 2003-2007, John Rusk Microsoft Excel (with a little manual assistance) John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/lessons_from_crystal.htmI presented a session at today's Wellington Agile BarCamp. The session was called "Crystal Clear: Big Lessons from a Little Process". Here are some brief notes on the presentation... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/opinions.htm"argue as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong"... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/id130.htmThere's a self-organising "conference" about agile development, in Wellington on 30 Nov 2007... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/job_in_wellington.htmAre you a good .NET developer looking for a job in Wellington, New Zealand? My employer is currently looking for .NET developers (junior, senior or anywhere in between). We may also be interested if your skills are mainly in testing or business analysis. What is the company like? Good! I'm very glad to recommend it. Skilled, friendly people to work with; great customer feedback. As I've often suggested suggested in this blog, working in an IT services company is full of challenges and opportunities. We're addressing those challenges and opportunities unusually well. (But I don't share all our secrets on this site ;-) If you enjoy working on successful projects, please get in touch via email [see page for link].... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/estimation_and_competition.htmI'm debating an issue with Steve McConnell, over on his blog, and I'd like to hear what you think. The question hinges on the uncertainty in early-project estimates: "Does a price-sensitive market make it impossible to win profitable work?" ... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/making_better_programmers.htmRecent research suggests that rapid feeback doesn't just improve software; it also improves the people who write it, making developers more talented... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/smarter_objects.htmI've been working on a new library/framework for .NET applications. It's designed to boost productivity and maintainability in key areas - doing for business logic what jUnit and nUnit did for testing. (I.e. Provide a simple structure and easy-to-use automation, so you can focus on the important stuff). You can ... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/scientific_experiments.htmSteve Yegge makes some very valid criticisms of the Agile movement. However, his assertion of a lack of scientific rigour is incorrect. Alistair Cockburn conducted exactly the kind of research which Steve calls for, without any pre-conceived notions of what the outcome should be (he started years before the agile movement was founded). He came up with a simple, effective process - which happens to be agile.... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/charting_change.htmLast year, I published some ideas about better charts for tracking agile projects - charts which add cost tracking to the usual progress tracking. Here's how to handle scope creep in those charts... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/effort_creep.htmWhile scope creep is doing more work than you expected, due to added scope; effort creep is doing more work without added scope. You're just taking longer to do the same stuff. Like scope creep, effort creep is inevitable and manageable. To manage effort creep we need to understand what causes it. Three major causes are... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/negotiation.htm#processMy article on negotiation turned out to be very popular. I've just updated it with a section on negotiating your _process_. You can't choose Agile just because you like it. You have to understand what your customers' interests are, and you have to seek a process which meets their interests and yours... As agile developers, we know that good software is about customer-valued features. So is good process.... John Ruskhttp://dotnet.agilekiwi.com/blog/After sneaking a few technical pages into my agile site, I've finally got around to creating them a home of their own. From now on, I'll post .NET programming stuff there. Postings to the new blog will not appear in the feed you're reading now; you'll have to subscribe to the new feed separately. Check it out at http://dotnet.agilekiwi.com. I'm starting with a series of posts on Microsoft's proposal for "Extension Methods" in C#, using some of Microsoft's own work to highlight a problem with the proposed design. John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/the_trust_barrier.htmIt is easy to fall into the trap of seeing trust as a prerequiste of agility. (I used to think that way myself.) Seeing trust as a prerequisite is both innacurate and counter-productive. At the very start of a business relationship, trust is naturally absent. If trust is absent, what do you do? You can't build trust with PowerPoint; you have to build it with collaboration. So... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/definition.htmThere is a widespread misconception that agility is about Pair Programming and Test-Driven Development. Agility is no more defined by Pair Programming and TDD than democracy is defined by having 50 States and a President.... John Ruskhttp://www.agilekiwi.com/memory_leaks.htm[Technical] I wanted a one-page summary of memory leaks in .NET applications. I couldn't find one that covered all the main points, so I wrote this...