The Mindset

I’ve received a lot of great feedbacks on my post It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It. I get the sense that many professionals “out there” are really fed up with the endless online (and offline) debates about “the best software development methodology”.
Reality proves over and over again that there isn’t such thing. The best thing you can […]

As a service to my readers, a high-resolution version of the manager’s pledge (aka step 5) is available here.
Don’t forget to put it where you can see it every day!

Warning: delicate issue ahead…
Kathy Sierra wrote a great article about Top Management Lies. Why is it great? First because it’s funny. Second, because most of us know deep inside that it is not fiction. Most of you know exactly what she talks about. The rest of you are extremely lucky (and this post is probably not […]

The issue of professionalism keeps showing up. I believe there’s a good reason for that: we as an industry really have to put more focus on professionalism.
In his latest article, Michael Feathers raises an important issue on the matter of doing a job right. Even if the code is going to be thrown away […]

I had an interesting conversation with a development lead today. The conversation was about the need for unit testing in a project which was about to start.
I suggested that the project would benefit from thorough unit testing starting from day one. He, on the other hand, argued that it would not be necessary for this […]

How many professional books have you read this year? A real book. Not a blog posting (like this one). Not the complete Java 2 reference. A real book, with coherent, mind-opening ideas. A book that changed your perception, or at least added something new to your knowledge or understanding (hopefully something that lasts longer than the time it […]

My Are Your Code Reviews Effective? post raised some fine questions. The most popular question regarding Professional Reviews argued that reviews conducted by a professional mentor will not provide the benefit of knowledge sharing that other reviewing methods seem to provide.
Knowledge sharing among team members is an important goal. Having only a single developer who knows […]

The great software-development-methodology wars never cease to amaze me. Agile, Waterfall, XP, SCRUM, RUP… so many people are so occupied with convincing everyone around them that their favorite methodology is the ultimate answer to practically any question.
Why is this a problem? Because no one methodology will ever be able to solve all problems. The […]