Neal Ford is one of the more well-known ThoughtWorkers and was the consultant I was paired with for a 1-on-1 this morning. The focus of the conversation was In an organization which has a top-down, command-and-control structure (owner), how do you adapt Agile practices since they are who needs to change the most?. Lots of useful stuff.
- What is their perceptions of what is good about the existing process? The new process will only succeed if those perceptions are still met.
- The notion that far off stuff changes, needs to be accepted. This prevents long, waterfall-ish planning.
- Done is a myth. What they get is a subscription to development and change.
- Dr. Laurie Williams has published a number of articles/studies on the efficiency improvements of Agile.
- Does a bowling ball fall faster than a golf ball? The answer seems non-logical. A lot of Agile is like that too. Such as the benefits of TDD and pair-programming.
- If people are analytical or scientific, then phrase arguments and proofs to that strength.
- Scrum provides project management practice improvements and XP provides the software engineering ones. Need both for true success.
- Mockrunner is a lightweight [mocking] framework for unit testing applications in the J2EE environment
- Unitils provides general assertion utilities, support for database testing, support for testing with mock objects and offers integration with Spring, Hibernate and the Java Persistence API (JPA)
- ThoughtWorks has a separate build on some SOA projects to just check the WSDLs of the components they depend on.
- First step is to formalize iterations. And make them super fine grain; one week.
- Start using proper story metrics
- Discipline in planning and execution allows you to do so statistical analysis of projects over time
- Demonstration trumps argument
- Pick one metric to focus on at a time.
- One ThoughtWorks project has a graph of cyclomatic dependency that shows it spikes given schedule pressure
- I need to run my TODO/FIXME script more often…
- Noone tells a bridge engineer to cut corners and skip demonstrated good practices when designing a bridget. Yet, we do it all the time in software.
- There is no credit limit on the technical debt account.
If no one ever dies when bridges fail, the bridge engineer would be asked to cut corners, too. Lesson? Software needs to kill more people, so good practices will be taken more seriously! 😉
ThroughtWorkers ?