Neal Ford is one of the more well-known ThoughtWorkers and was the consultant I was paired with for a 1-on-1 this morning. The focus of the conversation was In an organization which has a top-down, command-and-control structure (owner), how do you adapt Agile practices since they are who needs to change the most?. Lots of useful stuff.

  • What is their perceptions of what is good about the existing process? The new process will only succeed if those perceptions are still met.
  • The notion that far off stuff changes, needs to be accepted. This prevents long, waterfall-ish planning.
  • Done is a myth. What they get is a subscription to development and change.
  • Dr. Laurie Williams has published a number of articles/studies on the efficiency improvements of Agile.
  • Does a bowling ball fall faster than a golf ball? The answer seems non-logical. A lot of Agile is like that too. Such as the benefits of TDD and pair-programming.
  • If people are analytical or scientific, then phrase arguments and proofs to that strength.
  • Scrum provides project management practice improvements and XP provides the software engineering ones. Need both for true success.
  • Mockrunner is a lightweight [mocking] framework for unit testing applications in the J2EE environment
  • Unitils provides general assertion utilities, support for database testing, support for testing with mock objects and offers integration with Spring, Hibernate and the Java Persistence API (JPA)
  • ThoughtWorks has a separate build on some SOA projects to just check the WSDLs of the components they depend on.
  • First step is to formalize iterations. And make them super fine grain; one week.
  • Start using proper story metrics
  • Discipline in planning and execution allows you to do so statistical analysis of projects over time
  • Demonstration trumps argument
  • Pick one metric to focus on at a time.
  • One ThoughtWorks project has a graph of cyclomatic dependency that shows it spikes given schedule pressure
  • I need to run my TODO/FIXME script more often…
  • Noone tells a bridge engineer to cut corners and skip demonstrated good practices when designing a bridget. Yet, we do it all the time in software.
  • There is no credit limit on the technical debt account.