Richard Sharpe interviewed a number of people (including Neal Ford, Andy Glover, the Poppendiecks, J.B. Rainsberger, James Shore, and myself) to see what everyone thought of McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity.
Everyone thought it was useful, but for different things, and in different ways. I found it interesting to hear different points of view.
Video: McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity
Enjoy!
I often get email or questions about what is "Agile" and how do I start to understand it? This is the standard email I send back with a collection of links that have some good information on the topic.
The start of Agile
The Agile Manifesto
An overview of the many Agile flavors
The New Methodology by Martin Fowler
XP and Scrum are the most popular flavors of Agile, so here are a few links specific to them.
A comparison of XP to Agile by Bob Martin.
An intro to XP
Scrum info on Wikipedia.
These days most shops I encounter put together their own process by picking and choosing practices from various methodologies. Technically that's a hybrid Agile approach. The danger there is that you never try a practice that you don't think will fit and you miss out on a real gem that you never understood. The benefit is a set of practices that nicely fit your shop and team. That's the approach we took in Ship It!.
Whatever flavor of Agile/agile you latch onto, don't be religious about it. Be religious about your religion, not your software process choices. Be open to change and adaptation. Be willing to let someone else work differently than you.
Every day I keep seeing more and more tidbits in the Erlang area.
A week or two ago a friend of mine released virtuerl, an Erlang wrapper around Amazon's EC2 API (with aspirations to be more of a generic grid wrapper). Also see this post with more information and this one with an install image.
Today I saw this post, Introducing the XMPP application server: The Twitter example. It's a very cool app server for XMPP messaging. It scales across machines when you add hardware. The example app it shows is based on the Twitter model. So if you want to write a scalable social app with Twitter-esque messaging, use the API.
What does this mean? One of Erlang's strongest points is it's ability to scale across CPU cores and machines with a minimum of developer effort. It's beginning to fulfill that promise.
I've got to carve out some time to learn Erlang!
Just a quick reminder that Ken Pugh is coming to AgileRTP tonight. He'll be speaking on Business Value and Agile Requirements. If you're having trouble selling Agile processes to your management, you should give this topic some attention.
Business Value and Agile Requirements by Ken Pugh
This talk focuses on three questions. What is business value? How do we measure it? And what do we do with it? Along the way, we'll look at how business value relates to effort as measured in story points. And we'll examine what estimates really are.
In you're in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina, come visit us and hear a great talk!
I recently heard a great story about a software team getting frustrated with Cruise Control. Apparently that piece-of-junk software actually complains if you check in code that won't compile! Worse yet, it lets everyone see who checked in the bad code.
The team's solution? They wanted to turn off Cruise Control. Another developer removed his email address from the system.
David Bock's reply? Don't turn off the fire alarm. Deal with the fire.
Classic.
