[ Content | View menu ]

Monthly Archive December, 2008

Never was my favourite metaphor…

31 Dec 2008

Copied wholesale from D-Squared

In business circles, particularly among a certain kind of aggressive American businessman (or consultant, or banker, or politician, they’re fairly interchangeable), there is a favourite proverb about a pig:

“When you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, you’ve got your breakfast from a chicken and a pig. The difference between them is that [...]

Grumpy Old Man, IT industry - 2 Comments

Expressiveness makes the difference

17 Dec 2008

I was chatting with Keith about what the Software Craftsmanship event should really be about, in the context of a discussion of whether some of Jason Gorman’s list of guitar heroes are actually worth listening to (you still with me?) 1.

The next obscure piece of evidence is Maurice Murphy’s YouTube masterclass. For those who don’t [...]

Coding, Software culture - 2 Comments

After XpDay London

12 Dec 2008

Just got home after two intense days of XpDay London 2008. There’ll be follow-up materials posted on our new wiki. This year, Keith Braithwaite tried out a largely open format which was really buzzing by the second day.

In the middle of today’s keynote I was suddenly struck by the range of our community. With only [...]

Events, News - 0 Comments

TDD: fewer bugs to production, longer to write

8 Dec 2008

This paper1 from Microsoft’s Empirical Software Measurement group reports that

Case studies were conducted with three development teams at Microsoft and one at IBM that have adopted TDD. The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not [...]

Test-Driven - 15 Comments

“How do you judge if your firm is ready”

6 Dec 2008

From one of the Lean mailing lists. It was posted in the context of Lean adoption, but seems to apply to just about anything…

I believe there is only one pre-condition. The leadership of the company must believe “The status quo is no longer an acceptable way of doing business”. […] One of our associates [...]

Organisations, Software culture - 2 Comments