Agile Practitioner IL – Fourth Meeting

I had much fun at yesterday meeting. I really liked the amount of questions and interest people showed. While they didn’t make my life easy, I really enjoyed the conversation and discussion. for those who missed here are the slides Agile in unfriendly territories View more presentations from liorf Hope to see you all again net month and of course at the Agile Practitioners 2012 confere...

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Posted in: Agile Practitioners IL,Scrum

Agile Contracts

Agile contracts is an interesting thing. one of the main push back against going agile I get in places is that while agile is nice and all there is no way we can convince our customer to work like this. “they want a fixed price fixed scope deal”. In any case this post is not going to talk about why Agile contracts are a good idea, or how to get buy-in from your clients to sign an agile contracts. This post is going to talk about: The forces against an agile contract The power of Inertia People don’t change easily. The fact that our industry has been using a “Fixed …” contract for several decades now goes against trying anything else. Especially if that something else is substantially different. An agile Contract is exactly that. Different. Risk An agile contract puts the risk on...

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Posted in: Agile practices

Can you spot the Contradiction?

Here’s a job description I got over the mail (the original message was in Hebrew so I’ve translated): Subject : Project manager – Control of Agile software A project manage with control of Agile software is need for an international development company dealing in Wireless Electronics Must – BSC in engineering 1-2 years of experience in project management or in project scheduling and task tracking as part of the project team Experience in Configuration management – significant advantage. Experience in production processes, moving from research to production – an advantage Must have knowledge in Excel, Ms-project, Agile software Great interpersonal skills, teamwork, ability to work under pressure Fast learner of systems and processes, ability to dive into details ...

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“I have a Legacy System” is a lame excuse

Q: “why have you not written any automated unit test until now?” A: “ look, we have a and complex big system. no one has written automated tests for it. it will take me too long to do it just now. I know its important but we have XXXXXXX so we cant do it now” This kind of excuse, which sadly I hear way too often,  rate high among the “list of most lamest excuses”. Don’t believe me? How about this? Q: “when are you going to cut down on your expanses and start saving money?” A: “Look, I’ve already have a big mortgage on my house, and the cost of living has risen lately. So now is definitely not a good time to start saving. In fact since I just need to replace my car with a new one I’m just on my way to the bank to get an additional loan.” or maybe this? Q: “you know that you were diagnosed...

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Posted in: AUT,Development Practices,TDD

Agile Practitioners IL– Fourth Meeting

Just wanted to let you know that the Agile Practitioner group will be meeting for the fourth time on November the 6th. This time I’ll be giving the first part of the session and I’ll be talking about how agile can be adopted by a small part (maybe a single team) inside a bigger organization that might be using other more traditional processes. Like always entrance is free but registration is required. So please register here (SAP our hosts did ask that you will remember to bring your event ticket to the meeting) You all are invited to attend and I also ask you to help us attract more people to the meeting. Please invite your friends, colleagues or anyone else you feel might be interested in coming. We really like to  grow up our relatively...

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Your code should Always be working

Source control branches is always a good topic to argue about. if you read any of my previous topic (or just know me a little) you are aware that personably I think those to be a complete waste of time and effort. My personal experience (which is validated against places I consult in) is that most usages of branches are covering some inherent process problems that best be solved instead of hidden. but that’s not what I want to  talk about. what I do want to discuss is one of the main argument people raise for justifying their need to use source branches. and usually it goes like this: yes we would love to work on one main trunk, we see the great value in that. However, not all programmer knows how to work their code without breaking...

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Posted in: Design,Engineering Practices

Agile Practitioners 2012 Update

I think this is my first post on the conference, so lets start from the beginning. On January the 31st. We will be having a big agile day conference locally in Israel. We have been working in the last few months to make everything happen, from bringing in international speakers, looking for great content locally to arranging for a place to host the event. we also brought up a website for the conference: http://agilepractitioners2012.com/. go there to get more details about what the conference is about. I would like to let you know (and remind those who do know) that the call for paper is still open and we are still looking for great sessions given by great people to have in the day. if you have anything worth sharing please come and suggest...

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Posted in: Agile Practitioners IL,Conferences

TDD for Legacy Systems

We know test automation is crucial probably even mandatory, and TDD is a great practice to use, but lets face it our existing system is not test friendly to say the least. so now what? TDD for Legacy system is  my way to help people tackle this problem. During this two day training we will learn how to cope with existing systems. We will go over the basics of Test First methodologies and learn how to turn a system from a big  chunk of legacy code, into something that is covered by a suite of automated tests. we will discuss issues of setting up a continuous integration server, different type of testing that can be applied, how to tackle existing system design and how to slowly but surely improve our code base while writing automated tests for the existing code. the training...

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Posted in: ATDD,Course,TDD

Agile Practitioner IL - 3rd Meeting

Sunday evening we met for the 3rd time. This time Roy Osherove discussed 10 mistakes team leaders make an updated version of the slides can also be found here. During the talk Roy mentioned several books, out of those I really recommend Johanna Rothman & Eshter Derby, Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. For me that book was a career changer. I recall reading it as a team leader and for the first time I felt someone actually wrote a book that explained to me what a team leader job is all about. Also the book is filled with practical techniques that can be applied as is. from planning to conducting one on ones. Just the sort of advice I needed at that time. Scrum Master vs. Team Leader Towards the end of the session a discussion rose regarding the place of the scrum master...

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Posted in: Agile Management,Scrum

Making your team manage their own work

I really think that team leader should stop being the ones which split the work into tasks and decide who does what. I’ve written more about this subject and it was published here at the 5whys blog. (which is an excellent reading materials for team leade...

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Posted in: Agile Management,Agile Principles

Bug: $10, Future Bug: $200, Angry clients: $5,000, One TDD course: Priceless

When you write code for a living, mistakes can be expensive. They can create bugs that will crop up in the next version or the version after that, they can cause problems down the line for the end user who can't use the software and worst of all, they can create bugs that you spend longs days (and nights) working to find before the release. One way of avoiding these mistakes is Test Driven Design - write the test before the code and the bug (if any) is easy to find. And a course in Test Driven Design is not that expensive - and even less so today :) http://goo.gl/3VMqM...

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Posted in: Course,TDD

Introduction To TDD – Early Bird

Just wanted to remind that you can still get the early bird pricing for my upcoming training on September the 18th. People who will register by Tuesday the 6/9 will get a 50% discount for the course (making the cost only 600NIS per person). Details about the course can be found here, Registration details can be found HERE If you have any other question feel free to contact...

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Posted in: Course

The value of a 1 day introduction to TDD workshop

Next month I’ll be teaching a 1 day Introduction to TDD .NET workshop. And I was asked to explain what is the value of attending such a workshop. Clearly one can’t learn how to TDD in a single day, and indeed this is not the goal of the workshop. So what is the value in a single day Introduction to TDD workshop? I will let the reader judge for themselves. However here are the things I expect to cover during the day. Go over the basic rules of the TDD practice Explain and demonstrate what a testing framework is used for. Introduce base Isolation principles. Explain concrete ways for mastering the TDD skill. Go over the humps of pain – i.e. the main obstacles for doing TDD Let participant practice their firsts steps in a safe environment. I expect people to come out from...

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Posted in: Course,TDD

Starting TDD – One Day Experiment

A repeating question I encounter a lot is how to start with practicing TDD. in fact a while back I wrote a series of post on how one can start this in various contexts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, conclusions) some people claim that TDD is a group activity, therefore it’s a waste of effort to practice alone. I believe that TDD is a personal skill, and while its better to have the whole team doing it, it can be practiced alone. Nothing should prevent you from trying to improve the quality of your code. (and in most cases the added value will negate any delays you might experience initially). in this post I’m offering another way to start. in fact I think that a controlled experiment might be a better way to describe this. but anyway Practicing TDD for 1 Day To start you...

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Posted in: Agile practices,Development Practices,Self Improvment,TDD,tips

Agile Planning is just Enough

Actually Agile planning is based upon two main principles: Just enough Just in time that is, at each stage we plan just enough to get us going and answer the important questions at that stage and than we stop. In this post Gil talks about agile planning how it mainly focused on short term. Well Gil you missed some important staff about what you call Agile planning. lets start by saying that talking about agile planning as a concrete thing is basically misleading, agile planning is just a set of very basic principles (which I tried summarizing above). One need to refer to concrete planning practices in order to udge them.Planning is scrum does not look like planning in Kanban which does not look like planning in XP… The example used is taken from a medical field, in which the...

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Posted in: Planning,Scrum

So how are design pattern working for you?

A confession. I never did manage to make design pattern work for me. A disclaimer. I don’t think that this is because design patterns are in any way “wrong” or “bad”. Yes, I do use them occasionally and Yes, I do know a fair share of them. However, I always have this nagging feeling that I should know more patterns, and at the end of the day, when I’m actually designing my systems I rarely go: “ahmm I can use the XXXX pattern to do this”. So why is this so? why after so many years of using design patterns talking about patterns and even arguing quite a lot about them, I still can’t make them work for me? I wonder… The human brain as a pattern matching machine Start of July I attended at Vipul Kocher session during the SIGIST...

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Posted in: Design,Random Thoughts

Agile Practitioner IL– First Meeting

First group meeting went great. (Here is the group forming) Thank you all for coming and participating Elad Sofer which seems to be enjoying himself here, just blogged about it and I couldn’t have said it any better than myself. I will only talk about the second part of the meeting. During this part, we tried to get a feeling on where the group would like to take this forum/meeting/activity. W attempted to gather some ideas on the following: What content would we like to discuss How we would like o conduct these sessions who would we like to hear talking. and after some discussion and debate: Here are our main “finding” Topics of Interest The four winning topics are: Continuous Deployment Agile for...

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Posted in: Agile Practitioners IL

TDD .NET Course

Next month (starting on August the 8th) (Starting on August the 14th) I’ll be conducting a public “TDD .NET” course . Registration is now open for everyone, so go here and book your place. The course TDD.NET is based on practical experience and lesson learnt gathered over the past several years. The course main goal is teach basic concepts of TDD practitioners while giving participants enough practical knowledge to start practicing on their o...

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Posted in: Course,TDD

5 Reasons for Doing Scrum

A while back ago I gave a talk about what are the main benefits any organization should expect when changing its process into an agile (Scrum) process. Here is the recording of that session. Its about 50 minutes long and its in Hebrew. Hope you enjoy it...

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Posted in: Agile Principles,Conferences,Scrum

Open session With Jurgen Appelo

As a prequel to the first Agile Practitioners IL group meeting (register here). Jurgen Appleo has kindly offered to give a short, one hour, session during his visit next week. I know this is a very short notice but knowing Jurgen, I’m sure it be worth while. The event is limited in space so for further details and registration go here. And don’t forget that we would still like to see you all at the first formal group kick off meeti...

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Posted in: Agile Practitioners IL,Events

Video of my talk at “QA & Development In Agile” conference

Last month I spoke at “QA & Development in Agile” gathering. SELA were kind enough to video my talk and to make it avail;able online. Details about the talk (with the actual slides) can be found here. and if you want to tune in and listen to the actual talk (about 30 minutes in Hebrew) you can do it here. Also I would appreciate any feedback you can share. So feel free to add your commen...

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Posted in: Conferences,Events,Scrum

New Agile User Group – First Meeting

I‘ve been wanting for quite some time now to setup a monthly meeting for people who are interested in Agile. Since the demise of “Agile Israel” meetings I haven’t seen any sersiou sattempt of setting such a group, although I feel that many in the industry are interested . Therefore I would like to invite you over to the first group meeting of the “Agile Practitioners IL” . This session subject will be "Feedback". We will have Elad Sofer (which is also a co-founder of this group) talk about "Feedback - The secret ingredient of success", why feedback is so important for success and how it is used Since this is our first meeting we shall also try to gather feedback from participants on what else they would like to hear, and how they would like...

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Posted in: Agile Practitioners IL,Events

Flaw in SolutionContexts.GetEnumerator

I’m guessing that this post will be useful to a very small number of people if at all. However there might be a bigger lesson here for people writing their own collections and that is how not to code GetEnumerator method. but first some background information. when working with a visual studio add-in I needed find out weather a specific project is excluded from the build cycle. the DTE provide interfaces and object to access this info and the code I ended up with looked like this: 1: foreach (SolutionContext context in 2: ApplicationObject.Solution.SolutionBuild. 3: ActiveConfiguration.SolutionContexts) 4: { 5: if (context.ProjectName.Contains(project.Name)) 6: return !context.ShouldBuild; 7: }However, this code resulted...

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Posted in: IDE

Don’t you love useful error messages?

Ok now wh...

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Exporting Code Metrics from Command Line

A couple of months ago Microsoft released a tool enabling to gather code metrics on code form command line. (detailed post here). While it took me some time I’ve updated my Msbuild custom tasks project and added an Msbuild task for better integration of the tool into a build cycle. The task enable the exporting of metrics for a given solution and includes an xsl to transform the resulting xml into an html report. (older tasks in the project allowed running all tests (using mstest) in a given solution and exporting VS coverage report to an xml) To download the latest release go to here, and if you have any questions or additional requests contact me either through the CodePlex forums or direct...

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Posted in: MSTest,tools

Presenting at Sela’s Developers Days 2011

Towards the end of June I’ll be participating in Sela’s “Dev. Days” conference. Unlike other conference, “Dev Days” event is a collection of 1 full days workshops that will be given over the span of an entire week. During this week there will be 25 different workshops in various subject aiming at beginners and advanced Developers alike. My part in this event will be 2 workshop that I’ll be having: 1. Introduction to Scrum At this workshop ill be going over the principles of agile. I will show the basic Scrum process and technique and will demonstrate the key differences between Agile way of doing things and classical waterfall approaches. If you are want to know what the agile buzz is all about I really recommend attending this day....

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Posted in: Conferences

My Presentation at “QA and Development in Agile”

This is the presentation I gave last week over at the “QA and Development in Agile” conference (including some extra slides the I didn’t have the time to go over). Unlike other presentation this one was solely process related and not about any tool so I hope everyone enjoyed it. The main pint o the talk was that its more important to optimize the team feature throughput than the team utilization and I hope I managed to get it across. Scrum Project Management Would you like hear me present? Contact me! and in any case would love to get your feedback on the experien...

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Posted in: Conferences,Scrum

Moving from Fix price to Agile Contracts

One of the major roadblocks in an agile transition is the fact that when adopting an agile approach fixed price, fixed content contract does not make much sense anymore. sure, some organizations are succeeding in doing agile under such contracts but one of the promises of Scrum is to be able to easily cope with changing requirements, and change the work plan to contain the most valuable features seen at that time. On the other side, after so many years working under fixed price,fixed content contract its really hard to change especially since much of the time the other side (the one paying) is not really involved in the decision to adopt agile. Its all about risk a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk Giora Morein during a conference,...

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Posted in: Agile practices,Scrum