Increasingly, we build apps by composition with other apps. Granting that this approach is viable, still it comes with a cluster of related problems, and to really win with this style, we’ll have to address them. An "upstream" is an independent program that my application’s correct behavior depends on at runtime. It is typically 1) […]
Upstream Uptime #1: Grasping the Problem Read More »
A valuable trick I sometimes forget: first solve the easy customer. Before we continue, I feel we need to pull some real cases in this set of muses about story splitting. It can’t be super-concrete, because a) confidentiality and b) too much detail hides the idea. Hopefully, this will help a little with figuring out
Story-Splitting #3: Easy Customer First Read More »
I’ve described the basic concept of sociotechnicality before. I know it’s an awkward word. We don’t really have an easy word for it, because some very old and successful approaches to the world that didn’t need it. The world, however, has changed. Just about everyone I’ve spoken to has some idea of what "social" is
Sociotechnicality: Odd Word, Odd Concept Read More »
A new coach in the VBCA[*] world asked me what she should be studying. What, she asked, should she be reading, to get good at promulgating change in her large org? [*] – Very Big Corporation of America, see Monty Python. She proposed a bunch of topics, including management, psychology, sociology, a variety of geekery
Coaching Pro-Tip: Read More Narratives Read More »
I use my sorted list of story criteria when I have to back off getting the perfect story. We went into this yesterday here, and for the threading impaired, the blog will be up late tomorrow. There are a bunch of criteria for the perfect story, so many that at times I’m at a loss
Story-Splitting #2: Choosing Which Criterion To Relax Read More »
I sort my criteria for a story, so that when I step back from "perfect story", I step in the right direction. A "perfect" story has several attributes. Each of them contributes to its value in different ways, but maybe before we even list them we have to talk a little about what that value
Story-Splitting #1: Understanding the Criteria Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: The step-wise technique has to account for what the user experiences when, so I have to build ways to control that when stories get bigger than a day. (A new friend asked the question: when stories get hefty, how do we "live at HEAD" without exposing our users to code that’s still WIP.)
One Story, One Day Read More »
When I have to have WIP that’s live in production, I pretty much have to use all the approaches for side-by-side development. In some recent muses, we’ve talked about "in situ" vs "side-by-side" approaches to changing code. First, let’s refresh our concepts for these two phrases. In both cases, we have a bunch of code
Large Stories Mean Side-By-Side Technique Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: RORA (Run Once, Run Away) is insidious, and although I am an old-guard agilist, I still have to actively resist its charms every day. Alright, well, look, I figured out after some helpful application of 2×4’s to the head, that I needed to phrase these pro-tips as advice to me, even when, as
Run Once, Run Away (RORA) Even Bites Pros Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: An important steerability force for me is in my strategies for sidestepping the pyramid problem. There are a lot of ways we could describe this "pyramid problem". Perhaps the most straightforward way is to ask how much code is "in play" during a test. At some point, and it varies by codebase, the
Steering Around The Pyramid Problem Read More »
