Enerjy TV

Scrum # - An Interview with Alan Shalloway

Failing Scrum Projects

Breaking Brooks's Law

Menlo Innovations claim to have broken Brooks's Law by adding people to a late project and completing on time. We discuss the project and their working environment.

More On 'Best' Practices & The Dreyfus Model

An interview with Dan North of Thoughtwors

The Dreyfus Model - an interview with Andy Hunt

Emergent Design

Scott Bain talks to us about his new book: Emergent Design.

New Features in Java 6

With JavaOne commencing this week, there will be much persuasion for those not yet upgraded to Java 6 to do so. Although not as rich in features as the move to Java 5 was, Java 6 still has benefits. My favorites include: - A scripting engine (Rhino) for languages such as Javascript - Wildcard inclusion in Java classpaths - JTable sorting, filtering and highlighting in Swing - Zip files no longer have a limit on entries (was 64k) and include long filenames - Java DB included (based on Apache De...

Cease Inspections

When investigating Lean for the first time, books and articles that give an overview of the principles and tenets of Lean can appear to be contradictory. For example many managers may question how Cease Inspections can be advocated where a basic principle of Lean is to Create Knowledge. Surely one of the fundamental reasons of Inspections such as Code Reviews is to help more Junior Developers adhere to company standards and learn better, more efficient ways to code?I discussed this further wit...

Small Steps

When your manager says: "We expect you to write good quality code," many people, especially junior developers, will freeze, thinking about code structure, performance, best practices, company coding standards, patterns… the list goes on and on.At SD West, I recalled David Bernstein’s advice when writing a class. He said to ask yourself the question: "How would I test this class?" If the answer is too long or complicated, then you need to refactor the class. That seems like a good starting poin...

Selling Quality Initiatives to Management

Last week’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Crappy’ post, focused on some executives who may push for a quick release at the expense of quality initiatives. Most developers believe that these are not mutually exclusive, and have ideas on how things could be done better. However, many are reluctant to even mention these ideas to their managers for a number of reasons including:1) The ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ philosophy;2) They have seen management firmly stamp down on others’ ideas in the past and t...