Saturday, November 26, 2011

Patterns of Effective Delivery - Dan North

Another excellent talk from Dan North.

Patterns of Effective Delivery - Dan North from Roots conference on Vimeo.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Velocity is Killing Agility!



  • Velocity is increasingly being used as a productivity measure (not the capacity calibration measure that it was intended to be) that focuses too much attention on the volume of story points delivered.
  • Focusing on volume detracts from the quality of the customer experience delivered and investing enough in the delivery engine (technical quality).
  • Giving the product owner/manager complete priority control makes the problem worse—we have gone from customer focus to customer control that further skews the balance of investing in new features versus the delivery engine.
  • Particularly for those parts of the business for which high responsiveness (a deployment cycle time of days or weeks) is critical, investment in the delivery engine is as critical as investing in new features.
  • Management needs to allocate resources between features and engine work and then create a product ownership team consisting of the product owner and technical leader to do feature prioritization.
  • Value (value points) and cycle time metrics will help balance the detrimental effects of velocity measures.

Read the full article : Velocity is Killing Agility!

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

InfoQ: Apache Harmony Finale

The Apache Harmony PMC initiated a vote earlier this week to begin the process of moving the codebase into the Apache Attic and disbanding the PMC. With 18 for and 2 against, the result will be that the Apache Harmony project will be wound up and placed in the Attic for posterity.
Apache Harmony was an open-source clean-room implementation of the JDK, released under the Apache license, but could never call itself Java compatible as Sun refused to honour the JSPA which would give them access to the Testing Compatibility Kit (TCK), a pre-requisite of which is needed before an implementation can call itself Java. Apache's open letter to Sun, published on April 10th 2007, asked for and failed to receive clarity on the subject.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Being Agile with Lean Software Development

The “Lean” term has only been around in the business world since the 90s, but the underlying concept of lean production goes way back. While Henry Ford wasn’t the father of this approach (lean principles actually have Japanese roots), his strong focus on efficient use of resources is viewed as an important input in the development of this system. Automobile design and manufacture is definitely the industry most people associate with the lean philosophy since Toyota has made a point of marketing around this frugality and value-focused methodology for the last few decades.


read the full article here...

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Spring: The art of using GRASP Patterns


When we search for design pattern articles, we found essentially documentation concerning “Gang of Four” patterns, they are very useful and contribute to well design application.
But when I discovered GRASP principles , I advice any one interested to improve his skills design to look at these principles, it gives a design fondamental rules.
In this article we will discover some GRASP principles used by Spring, and the advantages of using them.