Why should you become Agile

One word:

I believe that a developer work should be one filled with the joy of creation. When I started out to become a programmer I thought that it would be great. my work will be filled with:

• Joy of creation when working on building a solution to other people problems

• moments of joy when completing new things and releasing them to the market

• moments of satisfaction from work well done

• moments of eureka when I find great solution to difficult problems

• moments of collaboration when I work with my team members to achieve a shared goal

a few years later I found out that:

• its not fun when you finally get your product to the market realizing you just solved the wrong problem

• Its annoying that whatever you are doing always seems to take longer then expected

• its frustrating when you never have enough time to actually complete your work as it should be done

• its not easy to work along other people which are stressed out just like you.

• its disappointing that you never get a chance to learn something new because now is not the right time and we first need to finish.

• its depressing to continuously get a stream of defects on the code you write

• its terrible to work 3 days straight to understand why the system keeps on crashing at your client, when it behaves perfectly ok in your own environment

• its frightening to work on unknown parts of the system not knowing if what you will do will only cause more bugs

So why should you become Agile?

Because being agile is one major step towards bringing the joy back to work:

If you really become Agile, you will gain back the control over what you do and how you do it.

If you really become Agile, you might get the chance to truly collaborate with you’re the rest of your team

If you really become Agile, you will work according to market feedback and needs on the important things first

and if you really become Agile, you just might bring some of the joy back to your work.

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Posted in: Agile Values

Why should you Learn TDD

One word:

I believe that a developer work should be one filled with the joy of creation. When I started out to become a programmer I thought that it would be great. my work will be filled with:

• Joy of creation when working on building a solution to other people problems
• moments of joy when completing new things and releasing them to the market
• moments of satisfaction from work well done
• moments of eureka when I find great solution to difficult problems
• moments of collaboration when I work with my team members to achieve a shared goal

a few years later I found out that:

• its not fun when you finally get your product to the market realizing you just solved the wrong problem
• Its annoying that whatever you are doing always seems to take longer then expected
• its frustrating when you never have enough time to actually complete your work as it should be done
• its not easy to work along other people which are stressed out just like you.
• its disappointing that you never get a chance to learn something new because now is not the right time and we first need to finish.
• its depressing to continuously get a stream of defects on the code you write
• its terrible to work 3 days straight to understand why the system keeps on crashing at your client, when it behaves perfectly ok in your own environment
• its frightening to work on unknown parts of the system not knowing if what you will do will only cause more bugs

So why should you learn TDD?

Because TDD is one major step towards bringing the joy back to work:

If you do TDD right, many of the stupid defects will go away.

if you do TDD right, your system design will improve making it easier and faster to change

if you do TDD right, you will have a safety net guarding you from mistakes.

and if you do TDD right, you may be able to bring some of the joy back to your work.

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Posted in: Engineering Practices,TDD

Instoolation

Instoolation (n): belief that process problems can be solved by installing a tool. Gojko Adzic, BDD: busting the Myths.

I see that mistake more and more everywhere I go. During last Iltam meeting Elad gave a talk about tools for agile project management and the general spirit of the audience was, we have all sorts of thing we need to solve and we expect a good tool to help us solve those. things like dependency tracking, risk management, predictability, traceability, and more.

there is no tool that will solve any of those problems, you first need to install a good process that address those problems and later on you might be able to use a tool to help you to reduce the effort you invest in the solution.

but actually I didn’t want to write much about that, I do want to discuss about what happens when you add another deadly ingredient in the mix:

Not Invented Here (NIH) – Syndrome

From Wikipedia:

Not invented here (NIH) is a term used to describe persistent social, corporate, or institutional culture that avoids using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins.

So what do you get when you cross an Instoolation disease with the NIH syndrome?

Right. A huge chunk of money that goes down the drain to develop an in house tool that aimed to solve a problem that can’t be solved by a tool.

Just to give an anecdotal example, in one of my past work places, I experienced a 5M$ budget goes into customizing an existing ALM tool which was then assimilated into the company over a period of about 2 years and with extreme pains. The fun part was once the project was “successfully” completed,the involved team was immediately taken to do a proof of concept on replacement tools since the developed system was considered wasteful.

It just pains me to see companies going that road.

Want to adopt Agile and don’t know where to start?
click here to learn

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Posted in: stories,tools

30 days experiments

If you have been following my blog you might have noticed a bizarre pattern in my posting. OK’ lets face it. I’ve been silent for more than 6 months and suddenly there’s an almost endless burst of posts.
What’s up with that?
One of the session I had the luck to join at xp2012 was a group of lightening talks. it was lucky cause I drifted in towards its end and managed to catch the last couple of talks. The first one I already blogged: The Manager's Dilemma by Ola Sundin dealt about management role. this post is dedicated to the second one and that one actually triggered my burst of posts.

Making Change Stick in 30 Days

The session was given by Tom Kealy and was talking about doing small experiments in changing behavior. I’ll let the slides talk for themselves and would just add that the talk was based on Matt Cutts TED talk: Try something new for 30 Days
I really liked his talk and decided to give it a try and since I really felt bad about my posting silence I thought that would me my first challenge:

post something new each day for 30 days

and here is were I currently stands:

The 30 days are not over, but I’m quite happy with the result. This was certainly something I will remember for a very long time. I think that my next challenge would be:

Do a physical workout every work day for the next 30 days.

so what would be your personal challenge?

 

 

Update:

this is how it looked at the end of the 30 days. Apparently I did some mistakes in the previous image. good for me

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Posted in: Random Thoughts

My Personal eXtreme Programming story

Today at Iltam meeting, I shared my personal experience in using a development process based on Extreme Programming. For all of you which are interested the slides (Prezi) can be found here.

I also would like to take a moment and thank Moshe Salem and Shlomit Morad for inviting us once again to give this session.

And last I want to remind you that next week we will be having the 9th meeting of the Agile Practitioners group. in this session Ayende will share his experience and his wisdom in writing automated tests. to register to the meeting go here

Want to adopt Agile and don’t know where to start?
click here to learn

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Posted in: Events,XP