Many development shops have opted to writing user stories over traditional feature/requirement documents; however, almost all of them struggle when writing their first batch of user stories. This is not at all uncommon, just like riding a bike, it does take a little bit of practice (but once you get it - you get [...]

Even good teams are susceptible to degrading into undesciplined cowboy coders - and it all starts with a single broken window. What I mean by a “single broken window” is in reference to the Broken Window Synodrome which states: If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired all the rest of the windows will [...]

By nature, I am a very peaceful man that loves all of God’s creatures; however, it has been a long time opinion of mine that Paris Hilton must be assassinated for her crimes against humanity. Paris Hilton embodies everything that everybody hates, and as a shocking result - everybody hates her. Here is the kicker - [...]

As we know, egoless development environments are necessary for a productive learning environment for our teams; however, I have been knocking around the idea of conducting an experiment and completely eliminating any traceability within the software process. Here is my thought: with the exception of “fail fast” pieces of the software process (such as the build [...]

I have come to grow very tired of Microsoft’s approach to building and marketing software to the masses, and here is the simple reason why: When you build software for everybody, you build software for nobody. I don’t remember where I picked up the term “customer polarizing” (I believe it was 37 signals), but it really resonated [...]

Having kids makes you busy. End of today’s lesson. Here are June’s top links: Foundations of Programming Ebook - Karl Seguin rocks it out with a serious eBook about the foundations of software development. This easily is the link of the month - great job Karl. Back to Basics: var != Dim - Loved [...]

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A bit of a rant, that we really need to quit thinking and speaking in terms of features, and start talking to our clients in terms of the benefits that they will gain. [Advertisement] - Atlassian provides zero-friction bug tracking and continuous integration solutions for software development teams. Visit Atlassian for free 30 day product [...]

Software teams are continually looking to adopt and mutate their processes to help counteract their immediate needs and weaknesses. And I think we can all agree that different software processes have their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it is only logical to say that the this equation holds true: Process Strengths + Current Team Weaknesses [...]

Last week during my birthday giveaway, SlickEdit was kind enough to donate a copy of their product Slick Edit Tools for VS.NET. Of course, I was unable to keep my mitts off of it and I had to give it a test drive before I gave the license away. First off, I am going to [...]