Brad Wilson mentioned on the TDD mailing list that the waste and inefficiency within the software industry was akin to the house building industry. I'm sure in some respects he is right, but in a more fundamental way I disagree. An average layman off the street hiring a builder can ask them to build...

I recently got brought on board to a new client where, true to form, a project was in a state of failure - everybody sort of knew it, but nobody would say it out loud. What Was Going Wrong? After my initial assessment, I made a quick decision that the major thing holding everyone back was an early decision...

Code quality is an abstract concept again, and can be defined may ways depending on how you perceive quality. A good discussion of the many aspects of code quality can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality Some general high level objectives for software quality could...

Industry experience suggests that the design of metrics will encourage certain kinds of behaviour from the people being measured. The common phrase applied is "you get what you measure" (or "be careful what you wish for"). A Brief Explanation of Cyclomatic Complexity and Code Coverage...

Some reports will highlight lines of code as a figure to attach some relevance to, and these become measures used to establish progress. These are possibly the most misleading figures to use, in fact almost always within a well designed application and code base, the reverse is true. Good code tends...

"Working software is the primary measure of progress" Fundamentally, there is no more valid measure for progress, than the working software itself. This only leaves open to discussion, the definition of "working software". Defining "Working Software" The criterion for defining...

I got an email at the end of last week from a developer asking about Agile development. It highlights a few problems with development in general, and with Agile as a "badge of honour" that are worth exploring. It deserved a fairly detailed reply, so excerts of the email follow: I just came...

Prompted partially by some comments yesterday on my post on How to Make Late Software, Even Later , and partially by a discussion on the altdotnet Yahoo list, I wrote this long email. As it became an epic in its own right, I thought it deserved a blog. We Are Doing Agile! I can claim to be doing Agile...