Posted on February 10th, 2007 in Methodology, Agile by siddharta || No Comment
One of the best ways to learn more about agile processes is to join the discussions on yahoo groups. There are loads of yahoo groups discussing agile. Here are some that I read:
Posted on December 12th, 2006 in Methodology, Agile by siddharta || No Comment
A commonly misunderstood aspect of agile project management is the role of documentation in agile projects. The agile manifesto says:
Working software over comprehensive documentation
This is misunderstood to mean that agile projects do not have documentation. Discussions about agile often revolve around this point, and statements of the form “Agile says no documentation, so lets stop documenting and we’ll be agile” are heard once in a while. At the other end is the “Agile says no documentation, so it’s just ad-hoc coding” camp.
Continue reading ‘The role of documentation in agile projects’ »
Posted on November 17th, 2006 in Methodology, Agile by siddharta || No Comment
This post by Dmitri kicked off a mini-debate about agility and rigidity. The debate is about whether a developer should be interrupted for a day to perfrom some side job. Check out the posts linked above for the whole story.
This is a common enough issue that it requires further examination.
At the root of the issue is what I call the flexibility-efficiency dilemma. This tradeoff is, in fact, at the root of many issues of agile vs traditional processes. The essence is that if you want more flexibility, you trade in less efficiency and vice versa.
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 in Methodology by siddharta || No Comment
Daniel Read has a very thought provoking post on whether software needs an Apgar score.
First, I encourage you to read both the original New Yorker article and Daniel’s post.
What is the Apgar score? If you don’t know, you didn’t read the article, so go back and read it. Okay, okay 
The Apgar score is a method used to determine the health of a baby at childbirth. The baby is scored between 0–2 on five factors: heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, skin irritability and skin colour, giving a total score between 0–10. The score is measured once at 1 minute after birth and again at 5 minutes after birth. A score of 7 or more is a healthy baby. Less than seven does not necessarily indicate an unhealthy baby, but doctors will look at the baby to be sure. Before the score was devised, determining the baby’s state was a complex mass of subjective measures which often meant that the baby was not given treatment when required because some factor was overlooked.
Continue reading ‘Do we need an Apgar score for software?’ »
Posted on October 26th, 2006 in Methodology, Agile by siddharta || No Comment
I was re-organising my bookmarks yesterday and I decided to collect some of them into a post. Here then, in no particular order, are twenty five posts on agile: