Author: Giovanni

I help software companies and teams to become more effective at producing and delivering high quality software. And I write code as well. More about me and my professional activities at http://www.asprotunity.com.

The Never Ending Software Methodology Debate

Posted on by Giovanni
  1. Start: Waterfall is the mainstream methodology
  2. The mainstream methodology shows some limitations
  3. Somebody proposes a new, or lesser-known, or almost forgotten methodology and shows how it addresses the limitations at step 2 (and how it’s better than Waterfall, of course)
  4. After a long argument, heavily based on personal opinions, and often light on facts, the methodology at step 3 becomes the mainstream one
  5. Go to step 2

Shooting Yourself in the Foot With Agility

Posted on by Giovanni

Recently I’ve started tidying up my folders and websites and I’ve found and read again an article I wrote almost seven years ago:“How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot. In an Agile Way”. Unfortunately, I think it is still actual and relevant–I keep coming across teams that make the same mistakes described in the article, then fail in their effort, blame the methodology and then try a different one hoping for different results (there is a very good blog post from Allan Kelly “Scrum doesn’t work for us; should we try Kanban?” describing one instance of this approach).

If you find yourself in a situation in which Agile is not working for you, I suggest to stop and analyse carefully what is going on, then try to address the underlying issues, before deciding to give up or to try a methodology different from the one you are using. You might be much better off.

ACCU 2010 conference keynotes announced

Posted on by Giovanni

The names of the ACCU 2010 conference (14-17 April 2010, Oxford, UK) keynote speakers are now public

  • Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum
  • James Bach, well-known software tester
  • Dan North, Agile coach, programmer, and inventor of Behaviour Driven Development
  • Russel Winder, author, trainer, and expert in parallel and distributed programming

As usual, the conference will feature some pre-conference tutorials:

  • A Certified Scrum Master course by Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield (the Monday and Tuesday before the conference)
  • An introduction to the D programming language by Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu
  • A course on software testing by James Bach

There is also a twitter account you can follow for updates: @accu2010.

The full programme will be announced shortly. It promises to be as exciting as ever–being the conference chair I know that for sure 😉