Clean Agile: Back to BasicsRobert C. MartinPrentice Hall, 2019 Bob Martin begins this book by describing it as his personal recollections, rather than a work of research. He starts by pointing out that agile software development started as a way of describing what had worked for some small development teams working on reasonably small projects.… Read More »
I enjoy reading the Worse Than Failure site as an antidote for programmer arrogance. While a junior programmer might look down on the people who made the reported mistakes, those of us who have been in the business for a while can recognize many of the mistakes. They still make a good laugh. A few… Read More »
What is it about programmers that cause them to latch onto one approach and try to apply it to every problem? Maybe it’s a characteristic of people in general. Each new paradigm, methodology, or even language seems to grab hold of many programmers and make them forget anything they ever knew. They seem to develop… Read More »
ACM Queue often has very insightful articles, and this one is no exception. The article ACM Queue – Death by UML Fever – Are you (or your developers) sick? covers a major problem in software development in a somewhat humorous fashion. I’ve seen several variations of this problem, but I never thought of it as… Read More »
One of the fundamental laws of the universe could be called the Law of Unintended Consequences. This law is as universal as Murphy’s Law, but not as well recognized. To me, the gut-level understanding of this law is one of the things that shows the difference between a really good programmer and someone who just… Read More »
Questioning Extreme Programming Pete McBreen Addison-Wesley, 2003 This book starts off with the premise that XP is really not appropriate for many projects. However, far from being a bash XP session, it turns into a very hard-nosed look at many methodologies. He compares many of the strengths and weaknesses of the major development methodologies in… Read More »