dwagner

A while back I wrote a review on persistence ignorance presented by James Kovacs and I thought I would give a quick update of what has happened since then.

Last week we held a Sunwapta Professional Development Day for our developers. The morning covered the theory and the afternoon we broke into two teams and built two aspects of a simple application to reinforce the learning.

Recently we implemented the technology in a real project, a .NET desktop application also using WPF.

Mission (learning and implementing NHibernate in a real project) accomplished and hats off to the team (on taking this first step).

Development […]

I’ve noticed one mistake that is easy to get into with agile project management and that is to not properly close off one iteration and then to seamlessly start the next iteration.

The biggest problems with this are:

• This gives the illusion that a project is just one giant iteration with work broken into a sequence of steps,
• There is no sense of completion or accomplishment along the way,
• Code is left in an unstable state longer and the customer does not see as much value,
• There is little to no effort going into re-evaluating priorities and involving the customer in decisions,
• There is little […]
  

Time and time again the wisdom of having a good release and iteration planning methodology comes to the forefront. This becomes incredibly important on a large complex project or one where the sky is the limit on what the project could cover (i.e. client is coming up with new ideas daily).

The reasons are simple:

• Focus, and
• Reduced complexity over the short-term.

Worrying about the design of the entire application up front is time consuming, likely to become dated and most significantly contributes to lack of focus and stress for a development team… where do you begin?

The solution is conceptually simple but […]