Gojko Adzic

Agile sells. It’s the new black. Companies are trying to roll out agile on a huge scale and even buy it as a software package. Teams sell themselves as agile as if it was the single guarantee of success that customers need, and people seem to fall for that. As agile adoption gets wider and more shallow, lots of teams struggle with those practices and projects are failing. Agile coaches used to be the best people in the business. A huge demand for agile people lead to mass production and a huge fall in quality.

This is a problem significant enough to be mentioned in the keynote for Agile 2008, the biggest meeting on everything Agile in the world last year, with Robert C. Martin calling for “Craftsmanship over Crap”. When Martin asked the audience who has at least once been significantly impeded by bad code since going agile, most people raised their hands. In November last year, Jim Shore wrote that “rescuing Scrum teams” keeps people like him in the business today, warning against “dubious ScrumMaster certificates [issued] to people who demonstrated competence in connecting butt to chair for two days”.

Agile simply became a buzzword that gets slapped on to anything and everything these days. As with anything else, a huge inflation of currency leads to the fall of value. Keith Braithwaite joked about avoiding to use “the A word” any more during XPDay in London late last year. So with everyone and everything agile these days and low quality in abundance, how do companies really know who they can turn to for advice or hire to avoid these problems? Continue Reading »

The next opensource .net evening in Skills Matter will be on the 15th of April, with two talks:

David Ross: NBehave

NBehave is a .NET tool for Behaviour-driven development (BDD), an evolution of test-driven development (TDD) and acceptance-test driven design. It shifts the vocabulary from being test-based to behaviour-based, and positions itself as a design philosophy.

Michael Delaney: Iron Ruby

IronRuby is a .NET implementation of the Ruby programming language, which heavily leverages Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime and allows programmers to write Ruby scripts for .NET.

The event will take place in central London, starting at 18:30. As always, the participation is free and open to anyone, but you have to register upfront for capacity planning.
See the event page to register and for more information.

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gojko adzic

http://gojko.net

Thanks for attending the talk today! You can download the slides from here.

At the SQLBits Goes Forth conference in Manchester today, Ramesh Meyyappan demonstrated impacts of some new SQL Server 2008 features on query performance. One topic he tackled in particular is compression, offering advice when to apply it and when not to apply it. Continue Reading »

On 30th of March, at the Skills Matter offices in London, I’ll be presenting an experience report from a recent project of a multiplayer games server deployed on cloud infrastructure using a computing grid for processing. The talk will be about architectural and deployment challenges, talk what was really good, what went bad, and what how the cloud changes the traditional approach to infrastructure and deployment.

The event is free to attend but you’ll have to register upfront. See the registration page for more information.