Steve Freeman

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there—lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold [...]

This “Darwinian” post that TDD Is Not For the Weak says that not everyone can cope with TDD, it’s for “the Alpha, the strong, the experienced”. I don’t want to believe this, because I think that developers who can’t cope with any level of TDD shouldn’t be coding at all, so I won’t.

This claim [...]

In this post, Tobias Mayer argues against doing Extreme Programming (XP). I have a lot of time for Tobias, but I think he’s wrong on this one. I don’t know who he’s been talking to, but some of this is “strawman” argument, and I’d be more likely to be convinced if Tobias had tried XP [...]

About a month ago, Michael Feathers wrote another post that cited Gordon Ramsey. That reminded me to follow up my earlier post with observations from a couple of episodes from UK series 4 that make the point (thanks Channel 4).
First up is a curry restaurant in Nottingham (which has no shortage of competition) opened by [...]

This post has been stewing for a little while, and now I’ve been kicked into writing it up by Naresh Jain’s post on Lessons Learnt from Restaurant Business.

Since Channel 4 in the UK started supporting the Mac for their online replays, I got hooked on Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares series1. I’ve never [...]

Via Brian Marick’s other site:

“Machinery helps you pay attention to what’s important,” Wajswol says. “In cheese making, there are a couple of things you need to focus on. If you can eliminate the nonsense—the mundane, nonskilled steps, like feeding the animals or warming milk correctly—you can spend more time focusing on the texture of the [...]

…which is why maintaining quality is so important.

From Hillary Johnson at Agile Open Northwest

In very bad taste, but very funny: “Hitler’s Nightly build fails”.

and we should remember that Stalin won…

So, Jurgen Appelo is unhappy that some of the more experienced Agile names have been telling him what to do. In particular, apparently they’ve been doing so without understanding complexity theory; he’s not reacting well.

In between the ranting, much of what Jurgen says is obviously true. For disorganised teams, adopting Scrum and nothing else will [...]

Dave West has written a cautionary posting (Lean and Agile: Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?) on the dangers of taking a simplistic view of Lean and Agile. He’s right that a naive reading of a Lean approach to software will just trap us in another metaphor, manufacturing, that’s as inappropriate (or appropriate) as we [...]