A while ago, I called for some participation on the state of our craft. I promised back then to present some intermediate answers in late January. Here they are.
Responses from the programmer and tester surveys
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Category Archives: XP
Some surveys on the state of our craft
One of my colleagues made a claim yesterday which I would viagra to put some numbers on. I raised the question on twitter, and received suspicious answers about the numbers of my colleague. Please forward this survey to anyone you know who is programming: http://www.shino.de/programmer-survey/ It consist of just four question, so you should be able to answer them in a few minutes.
Over twitter I also received the feedback that things are worse for testers. I would like to put numbers on that as well. Therefore I also put up an equally small survey for tester: http://www.shino.de/tester-survey/ Please forward this survey to anyone in the software business that you know of.
From time to time to I will publish some of the results. I aim for end of January for the first set of data.
A week with Kent Beck
In November I had the opportunity to stay a whole week with Kent Beck. it-agile GmbH invited him for two courses – Responsive Design and Advanced TDD – and one workshop to Hamburg, Germany, and I took both courses and the workshop. Today I was contacted by Johannes Link who was surprised not to find a write-up of this week on my blog. It turns out somewhere during the past year I have turned into a reporter. So, here is my summary from what I could get from my notes. Initially I planned to write it via email to Johannes, but then I though why not share those comments on my blog. Maybe others are looking forward to it.
Software G Forces – The Effects of Acceleration
At a local talk in Hamburg, Kent Beck talked about G Forces in software, and what effects acceleration of the software process has. With regards to Continuous Deployment he talked about scaling up the deployment cycle from annually to a deployment cycle within minutes.
XP2010: On tree hugging
While I’m at the XP2010 in Trondheim, I try to update my blog with some of the interesting sessions I attend. This is the write-up from an Open Space session that bothered to think about the tendency to go more and more meta in the Agile movement after all, and whether means that we have nothing really new to talk about-
Scrum Norris
Yesterday evening there was a thread of scrumnorris going over twitter. Since these messages were in German, let me translate them.
- Chuck Norris is ScrumMaster and ProductOwner – simultaneously.
- Chuck Norris can do 6-month sprints.
- Chuck Norris wears Timeboxershorts.
- Chuck Norris does not move story cards, he moves the taskboard.
- Chuck Norris does not estimate, he knows.
- Chuck Norris pairs alone.
- Chuck Norris starts project with a Roundhouse-Kickoff.
- Chuck Norris is allowed to appear late at the stand-up.
- Chuck Norris sits on the stand-up meeting.
- Chuck Norris has implemented everything at the planning meeting.
- Chuck Norris does not estimate user stories, user stories estimate him. (This doesn’t translate well.)
- Chuck Norris writes the code first, then the test.
- Chuck Norris is not afraid of bugs, bugs are afraid of him.
- Chuck Norris does not do Kanban. He does not know limits.
- Chuck Norris does not pull, he pushes.
- When Chuck Norris says “done”, then it’s “done”.
- Chuck Norris does not deploy, he develops on the production environment.
- Just Chuck Norris knows, that a real burn-down requires napalm.
- Chuck Norris has no burn-down chart. Around him everything is already burnt down.
- Chuck Norris answers just two questions on the stand-up meeting. Chuck Norris does not know obstacles.
- Chuck Norris does not prioritize the backlog.
- Chuck Norris takes two baby-steps at once.
- Chuck Norris does not use test-driven development. Chuck Norris always drives.
- Chuck Norris is the prioritized backlog.
Any additions?
Not a process
Alistair Cockburn told us about a research in the UK on Scrum. He pointed out to the student, that Scrum is not a process, but something different. This made me thoughtful and I decided to elaborate some more on the terms and reflect on the other Agile methodologies about it.