11/30/2006

Ken Schwaber on Quality of Code

Ken's presentation "A Canary in a Coal Mine" at Agile2006 conference is available via InfoQ. Ken talks about quality and the danger of Scrum teams droping quality issues to get higher velocity and to be sure to hit the date. He calls this a re-definition of "done", or "somewhat done". We have manifested an increasing technical debt in our iterative work. So in the last project we were putting more focus to acceptance testing inside each sprint and introduced something we called "cross-testing". This means that other pair needed to test the feature implemented by other pair in order to claim feature "done". Embedded firmware systems need a lot of manual acceptance testing (at least our current practice) and it is easy to get slobby testing your own work over and over again.

Was the technical debt there because of Scrum? Well, no - it was made visible by Scrum and the team was able to decide to do something about it early enough.

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Ken's another speech about Scrum is available at Google Video. (You will find out that Scrum works with idiots as well)

I posted about Jeff Sutherland's Scrum speech earlier. It is also available via InfoQ.

11/26/2006

XP2007 Conference Web Page

XP2007 web page is open. The conference will be held on June 18-22.2007 in Lake Como, Italy.

In the scope of conference is:
  • Embedded software (e.g., SW/HW co-design) and Agile SW development

...among of course other interesting stuff. Hopefully we see some papers in this domain as well. I attended the conference this year in Oulu, Finland, and if next year's event is anything like that - I can highly recommend attending.

11/21/2006

NPD in General With Agile and DSDM

Iterative and incremental development ideas have been presented for general new product development (NPD) for years. I'm interested in agile methods (as in software development context) because they give a philosophy behind and lots of ideas how to actually do this. It is of course also because of extremely active and powerfull community. Ideas of using these methods and practices in NPD in general have been presented by Jim Highsmith (Agile Project Management), Preston G. Smith (Developing Products in Half the Time), and many more. Both of above mentioned can be contacted via Cutter Consortium.

Now there is something new coming up. At London Agile Business Conference 2006 few weeks back the DSDM consortium talked about the future of the DSDM framework. DSDM version 4.2 has been open for online viewing since this year. They are going to publish a new version of framework in Spring 2007. This new version is supposed to be more general and not specifically targeted to just software development. It was also presented that DSDM can be seen as a wrapper for models like Scrum and XP for use in enterprise environment. It's a bit too structured to my tasting, but very well worth to check out when available. It may also become more open.

11/17/2006

Risky Business

It has been identified that the biggest risks in project work concern management and marketing. Yet, in most environments we only concentrate on technology risks. Agile, incremental and iterative, development is also often assumed to be risky. By changing the way of thinking about risk, people would see that iterative risk management is a proactive way to tackle all aspects of risk. A very simple way.

1. Management risks - just fund the project for the time zone you are comfortable

2. Marketing risks - use the first possible release to test the waters

3. Technology risks - use the effort early to tackle any technological uncertainties that traditionally are left lurking until the (assumed) end of the project

The status quo practice is quite different. We take huge risks by starting a megaproject, for example estimated to 5 calendar years, based on a business case. Everyone knows that business case targeted five years from now is pure speculation. In the global markets it's a very expensive speculation by the way. Based on this speculation management needs to make a decision for funding a five year project. Their natural reaction to tackle the risk is to review the project mercilessly. We can be sure that changes to project requirements, technology and scope will happen. We have this heavy review practice going on making the project move even more slowly. More time means more changes, more changes mean more reviews - are you starting to get the picture?

Most of us see this everyday. How do we try to fix it? Naturally by reviewing. Because? That's what we allways do.

11/10/2006

Refactoring for C

SlickEdit is a commercial compiler source editor that many people speak highly about. I thought I will give it a spin and downloaded the trial version. Their web page describes "cool features", but for some reason refactoring is not listed. Anyway the product has capabilities for refactoring several languages, and few quick refactorings (based on tagging instead of parsing) even for C; extract method, rename, modify parameter list, and replace literal with constant. At least for simple code they all seem to work. SlickEdit is also available as Eclipse plugin. I only tested the own IDE version.

You can find out the reason why there are not so many refactoring tools for C from MS and doctorate thesis by Alejandro Garrido. They are available via this site.

11/04/2006

Web Page for Embedded Unit

Embedded Unit (embUnit) is an unit test framework for embedded C systems. It now has a simple web page with manual. It is not pretty, but it is something.