Apr 28 2008
Delivering useful software
One of central agile programming ideas is to deliver frequently and get feedback early. To get the full benefits of this approach, it is not enough just to make sure that we deliver often and seek feedback — it is extremely important to plan our deliveries correctly as well. If the deliverables are not complete in the sense that they can really be used in production, then the feedback is not as relevant as we would like it to be.
Here is a situation I have seen a few times more than I would have wanted: the team and the clients split the whole project into several phases that will be shipped every few weeks; early deliverables mostly provide the plumbing for the later ones, and have only enough user-interfacing functions for the plumbing to be tested functionally. The clients set up and play with each new release. They dutifully give their feedback and participate in testing each time. When the whole thing comes together on the end, it turns out that the system still requires a lot of changes to solve the problem that it was intended for — the iterations and customer feedback failed to provide the directions. Continue Reading »
I have been using the Castle Project for about two years now, and it is definitely one of my favourite tools. It is truly a great example of how a good application framework should be written. Although all the concepts that it provides have been around for a while and became popular with other frameworks like Spring for Java or Ruby on Rails, the Castle Project brings them together in a very effective way and makes enterprise .NET development significantly easier. 
It is fairly obvious that web site performance can be increased by making the code run faster and optimising the response time. But that only scales up to a point. To really take our web sites to the next level, we need to look at the performance problem from a different angle. 
