The Mindset

Yesterday, I wrote about ten software development myths, which unfortunately are still around. In his comment to my post, Tim King wisely argued that the ten myths I had listed were all big-company myths.
Tim, I know you said you are going to write your own top-ten small-company myths and misconceptions, but I just couldn’t resist […]

A car is a wonderful tool. It can get you from one place to another quite effortlessly (well, assuming the two places are within reasonable distance). For most of us, cars are cost-effective and convenient. They serve their purpose amazingly well, at least until some higher form of transportation emerges.
There’s a lot to consider when […]

A couple of days ago Kathy Sierra wrote about the difference between who companies say they want to hire and who companies actually want as their employees.
When I read Kathy’s post it sounded awfully familiar. Sure, I have seen the exact same phenomenon with my own eyes: companies allegedly looking for smart, innovative, independent people, […]

In a recent article, James Shore describes the dynamics in the CardMeeting project.

“All of these things would have been good things to fix. In particular, implementing tests would actually have made us faster, and it would have only taken a week or two at most to figure out how to use TDD in our UI- […]

For decades software development practitioners try to find the ultimate software development metaphor. This is not merely an academic discussion. If we can find a good metaphor for software development we might actually learn something from it. We can make analogies and try to apply things we already know about our world to software development […]

In my previous post I questioned the popularity of peer reviews in the real-world. I claimed that there might be a good reason that most organizations are not practicing systematic peer reviews: the nature of peer reviews causes too much overhead and context switching, which makes them ineffective for the long run.
But what about […]

When I first wrote about professional reviews as a mentoring platform, some people responded with the question: what’s wrong with peer reviews anyway? Why do we need a person specializing in code and design reviews instead of assigning this task to peer developers within the development team?
As I explained in previous posts (and as you […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Hijacking Of The Word Agile. In that post I’ve mentioned Jim Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.
And today, a new comment was added to this post by… Jim Coplien. Due to the illusive nature of the Web I can’t know the author’s identity for […]

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 […]