Super Volatile

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

Hi, I'm Krzysztof and I make websites.
When I'm not making websites, I read these.
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agile

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Oct 23 / 6:49pm

Simple Hickey

Rich is concerned, and rightly so, that we have a culture of complexity. That when programmers are given a task, they race ahead and write masses of tangled code, using “easy” frameworks and tools, without giving the problem due thought. That we confuse easiness, with simplicity. (e.g. Rails is easy, it is not simple.) His complaint about tests is that we used them to replace thought. That we feel good about ourselves because we’ve written tests, and yet we haven’t actually given the time to the problem that the problem deserves. We haven’t made the problem simple. We’ve just done what was easy.
more on blog.8thlight.com

Sometimes overlooked negative consequences of agile practices on design.

Filed under: agile   software development   test driven development  
 
Jul 25 / 8:10pm

Individuals Over People

I'm still a believer in Agile. It's the best way I know how to take an average performing team and put them on a path to becoming a well performing team. However, I think the Agile practices also put a ceiling on how effective a team can be. Perhaps my favorite anecdote: Ola Bini believes he is 10x faster when using Emacs as compared to IntelliJ - when writing Java! 10x is huge, so what does he use when he's pairing: IntelliJ. If there's knowledge transfer occurring then perhaps the 10x reduction in delivery speed is a good decision; however, if he's pairing with someone of a similar skill level who isn't statistically likely to maintain the code in the future it's a terrible choice. Ola is programming at 1/10 of his possible efficiency for no reason other than it's the Agile way.
more on blog.jayfields.com

How agile can impair individual productivity in some situations.

Filed under: agile  
 
Jun 10 / 12:31am

What agile means to me

So, a few lessons I've learned along the (hard) way:

  • The best way to achieve your goal is to start with the right people
more on blog.rodger-brown.com

A critique of a blind faith in Agile. Often Agile seems to be praised like communism in the past: if it doesn't work, then it must have been faulty execution and people.

As for the learning quoted above, it's amazing how much good people can achieve in hostile and bureaucratic environments. Certainly more than bad people equipped with a perfect methodology.

Filed under: agile   software development  
 
Sep 9 / 8:10am

Agile Ruined My Life

Scamster? Ron Jeffries the guru/founder of Agile couldn't write a Sudoku implementation with his favorite technique "TDD" and refactoring over five weeks. Fraud.

Robert Martin (another "guru" and agile consultant) claims that any code not written with TDD is "stone age " code including such things as Unix and such people as Norvig and Linus and Zawinski who've built more code than he can dream of. Dalke poked holes in his TDD "kata" which never got answered Fraud.

more on whattofix.com

Some harsh critique of agile. As usual, coming from the agile camp itself.

Filed under: agile  
 
Aug 22 / 7:51pm

Agile people still don't get it

One of the first slides that deeply troubled me claimed the following:

  • Tests are (executable) specs.
  • If it’s not testable, it’s useless.
more on beust.com

What I see as a problem here, are the extremists. In my experience dealing with too devoted zealots of even perfectly reasonable methodology have been sometimes more difficult than actual problems we were trying to solve.

Filed under: agile   software development  
 
Jul 31 / 11:47am

Agile+UX - remembering what a team's sposed to be

There are a lot of agile teams where we like to say “the UX person has been struggling”. We talk about culture clashes, misunderstandings, wagile, sprint 0, and scrums. And there’s often a good bit of derision and disrespect that drips from the engineering community about UX, in general.
more on thinkingandmaking.com

Clashes between UX and developers look almost natural. The article proposes that they can be diminished by developers helping UX with design. While this advice is sound and practical, it also requires UX designers to be willing to accept input from the developer bunch. And that's a whole new topic.

Filed under: UX   agile  
 
Feb 5 / 1:26am

Conversational Stories

Here's a common misconception about agile methods. It centers on the way user stories are created and flow through the development activity. The misconception is that the product owner (or business analysts) creates user stories and then put them in front of developers to implement. The notion is that this is a flow from product owner to development, with the product owner responsible for determining what needs to be done and the developers how to do it.
more on martinfowler.com

Uplifting statement from one of the father's of Agile.

Filed under: agile