Software Best Practices

Steve McConnell put up a post on his lack of a real estimate for a child's fort and how that was related to a software project. I have a similar example of an agile bathroom remodel. The Story Our existing bathroom had a small problem. Water was leaking through cracks somewhere in the older tile...

A couple of posts ago, I shared a concern with distributed agile development. A similar thing happened to me recently with another question from two different clients who work on a highly complex mobile operating system. "Can you be agile in highly complex environment with emergent system characteristics...

I had an interesting discussion recently with two different people about moving toward a more agile development practice. The first was a potential client who had a small team in California. The second was a with the office staff of a services firm who wanted to better understand what agile is all about...

So, I was driving along, making a right turn into a driveway like I have done a thousand times before. I did what one always does when making a right turn: I checked carefully for pedestrians and watched the driveway to make sure nobody was coming down it. I then signaled my intentions and proceeded...

I was teaching an Agile seminar recently when the image of a PEZ candy dispenser popped into my head. Why, PEZ candy, I thought, is just like an Agile project. You work things in priority order by taking what is off the top of the stack of similar sized bits of work. We know that they are similar size...

I really do. I mean, all those details you have to keep track of. Everybody coming up and asking you questions like you have some clue about what is really going on. And of course you pretend like you do. "Why, were are three days away from the googoo gate." What I really want to say is, "I...