Software Development

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 […]

The other night I attended a seminar given by James Kovacs for the Calgary .NET user group. Essentially the topic was Persistence Ignorance (PI) using NHibernate.

I am more focused on application functionality, domain expertise, application usability and user interface design than what is underneath the hood. I leave the coding to the developers I work with.

Nevertheless, I have always been a proponent of separating the user interface, business logic, infrastructure plumbing and database (persistence) and not mixing the concerns unless you have to. I love the idea that loose coupling, programming to interfaces and good tests can […]

If your organization is like our organization, you were pair programming on and off long before attempting to adopt agile practices. Back then it was called mentoring and solving a difficult issue as a team.

For the last 6 months or so we’ve been using pair programming in a much more XP way on certain projects (driver and navigator, switching roles, etc.).

When the team is estimating work or tracking actual effort, there does not seem to be as much productivity gain involved as we had hoped. Usually the developers are saying, “Hey we like pairing, but I could do the same […]