Software Development

I finally understand something that has been nagging me for years.

It's the answer to "Why do the majority of software developers shun user interface design."

The user interface is the part the customer usually sees. It should be the glamorous or satisfying part of software development.

It is like building a car without caring what the interior, dashboard or exterior look like. Sure the motor and wheels are important, but who wants to drive or buy a chassis with motor on it? Judging by what I see on the road, very few people.

The reality is that the user interface design is:

• Part art […]
  

Sadly there is a misconception that performing any up front design in an agile project is a bad thing… pretty much forbidden because the opposite of agile is waterfall.

This misconception misses the whole point of building great software… use all the tools you have at your disposal in the most appropriate way and if something is not working fix it. Agile is not meant to be a rigid process… it’s meant to be an attitude of continuous improvement. (Caveat, when you are first learning anything, stick to the proven process as you don’t know enough yet to know what is important.)

Right from […]

I recently read a post by James Shore (The Decline and Fall of Agile). It matches what I am seeing and hearing.

In the beginning, agile was considered leading edge. It was practiced by teams of fairly experienced developers and tended to have at least a few top developers on its successful teams. It was succeeding in the right environment.

Then along comes the mainstream.

Become agile and your projects are guaranteed to succeed. No more pesky Waterfall with its up front requirements and engineering. Use Scrum and write code as fast as you can and if the requirements change, […]

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 […]