Comments for Software Engineering - from the Trenches

Comment on Setting Expectations about Formal Releases with the Business Team by Software Specification is a Process Not a Document (1 of 2) « Software Engineering – from the Trenches

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 01:02:30 +0000

[...] In my world of enterprise software, the customers, and the business team, want to know months in advance what features will be available by when. Both the release date and the features are determined before the start of the project (sometimes weeks before) and must be met. This is not Agile, but it is reality – see my earlier blog “Setting Expectations about Formal Releases with the Business Team” [...]

Comment on About by swengineer

swengineer — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:31:50 +0000

Finally got to it! thank you for pointing it out

Comment on MVP – Minimum Viable Product by Bill Bartmann

Bill Bartmann — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking your feeds too now, Thanks.

Comment on About by babble

babble — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:56:44 +0000

Might want to consider updating this page

Comment on Pair Programming – Does Anyone Do It? by swengineer

swengineer — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:25:18 +0000

Thank you. I agree with your perspective.

While I don’t think pair programming is effective – I am also surprised at how *little* developers ask others to review their code. To me, it makes a lot of sense to have a friendly 1on1 code review every once in a while, and certainly before submitting to QA!

Comment on Pair Programming – Does Anyone Do It? by samberoz

samberoz — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:17:13 +0000

While I don’t personally have first hand experience I’ve seen it done at my workplace. Sometimes the developers shared a single terminal and sometimes they were physically separated and used NetMeeting. The effort seems to have faded as we always have more work then people available to do it. My own thoughts are that the XP model itself is a little flawed by the thinking that if a little of something is good a lot of it will be great. This philosophy is right there in the name: eXtreme. Whatever happened to the old quote “Moderation in all things?”

Comment on Nice presentation on “The Lean Startup” by swengineer

swengineer — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:44:26 +0000

By the way, I highly recommend the book cited in the presentation:
“The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Successful Strategies for Product that Win” by Steven Gary Blank. It is to product management, what Extreme Programming was to software development a few years back.
http://amzn.com/0976470705

Comment on Who Owns Quality? Part 2 by swengineer

swengineer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:07:05 +0000

Great point.
First and foremost, quality has to be a state of mind. We agree that sometimes it is a challenge to ensure that all developers have, or acquire, this state of mind. This is why I talked about pride of one’s code. If the pride is not there, then I don’t think there are any tools, or metrics, that can inject quality back into the product.

If engineers don’t get it emotionally, then maybe they’ll understand that, overall, it takes a lot less time to do it “right the first time”. The back-and-forth exchanges with the QA team end up sucking a lot of time.

Finally, and I’ll address this in an upcoming post, saying that the developer “owns quality” does not mean that he/she writes all the test code, or runs all the tests. This can/should be done in partnership with the QA team. Similarly, the tools, metrics and exit criteria should be decided by the project team. They can vary on a project by project basis, and even by milestone within a project.

Comment on Who Owns Quality? Part 2 by samberoz

samberoz — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:07:22 +0000

I agree. If the answer to “Who owns quality” is anything other then “I do” it’s wrong. The trick is getting people to translate those words into actions. I don’t like acting as the quality police giving demerits for low unit coverage or the introduction of warnings found by static analysis. Besides those are just metrics that are easy to capture. What about the unmeasured 99%? If you have ideas on promoting a culture of quality I’d love to hear them.