Corporate Craftsmanship
Interview with David Anderson Part I… First time I hear the voice of Dave Anderson after reading his blog. David speaks also about craftsmanship in this episode saying that craftsmanship is mainly an individual attitude and as such it shouldn’t be a problem to apply it to enterprises because it does not require changes to the actual process. I agree. I also think that should be easy to organize large companies into cross-departmental mentoring hierarchies. After I heard this podcast I thought that really craftsmanship is all about continuous self-improvement and the mentoring organization (master programmer, journeyman, apprentice) is just how individuals, who try hard to self-improve, collaborate. Same for team dynamics: individuals cooperate to improve their craft as a collective.
Unbound Developers - Interview with David Anderson Part II… I heard again interesting things in this second episode of the podcast. David advocates the introduction of a new process in a company by examining the context and adopting values and principles first. It’s the company responsibility to set the goals and find the best practices for them which can come from XP or Lean for example. In the need for a change is the team that self-organize and choose what practice works best in their situation. David’s take on generalists VS specialists is that a profitable company needs both. With only generalists you have for sure flexibility and probably fast time to market but lack of marginal value (the key differentiator for a product on the market). Specialists are able to bring that key differentiator for a business to succeed in the long term. I also heard a quick history or FDD, circa 1987. FDD is like enterprise-agile with more design and architecture up-front to mitigate mission critical risks. I found evident traces of FDD in today’s DDD.
Startup Interviews: Balsamiq Studio LLC | Zen and the Art of Programming… I think I heard about Mockups on some Stackoverflow episode but then I forgot abut the name when I wanted a tool to do rapid sketches of pages or part of an application. Glad I found a second reference, as usual when the tool is really a good tool. I’m impressed by the company effort to maintain good customer relationships and the web based office idea to keep the overall company costs very low. Happy to hear about italians doing great things, but sadly they are or they were first out of Italy to produce their ideas and leverage their potential.
Smarticus - Introduction to Acceptance Testing Ruby Web Applications… Simple and enjoyable presentation on the typical Cucumber stack. I’m catching up these days with the latest evolution of acceptance driven development but having some real life experience with the story runner and webrat-rspec already I’m just focusing on the new things. Nice to see that there is a standard webrat steps library for common steps and the good use of regular expressions. Bryan made a good point worth remembering. It’s fun to use Cucumber for development, but it’s more a customer facing tool than developer oriented. If you don’t have a customer willing to collaborate to write scenarios, you might want to switch to rails integration tests plus webrat (if you use Rails). Bryan doesn’t use CruiseControl because it’s too big… I also like Integrity, but the size of a product is not very important to me. Am I missing something?
lizkeogh.com - What does “Not Agile” look like?… Interesting point of view. Actually, I can’t remember of an example of someone telling me “we aren’t agile”. That depends of course on the kind of people I know. I agree: if we can all be agile just by saying the word, then the term failed to describe itself. At the same time Uncle Bob’s example of filtering the audience by practices is not a perfect indicator either. Maybe this question is more appropriate: have you tried the practice you claim is not working for your organization before removing it? Definition of “try”: practice used consistently for at least one small (or above) size production project or full release (if the project is big).
2 years ago