To be a leader is not the next step for managers. It is the manager’s job to leave room to leaders.

It’s always a good way of learning and improving yourself by looking at how others do it, take and adapt those things that make it better for you. I particularly liked the phrase “more democratic than scrum”, I wouldn’t have imagined such a thing is possible.

Ah, and let’s not forget the “let me fix it by commenting the assertion, this will make our build green”.

• you embrace the idea of tailoring the final solution while developing it, because you would get a satisfied customer, who can adjust his/her priorities as the project develops
• you think that Scrum is more suited to the projects developed internally by companies who don’t have a client pressure because they are their own customers, who have already a specific set of resources which can be alloted and can afford changing them in the interest of the project; you just can’t picture how this could apply to web/mobile development targeted to your clients

Let’s remember what Scrum is: a way of developing software incrementally, each iteration producing shippable software. What isn’t clear, though, is the way costs are handled. Alistair Cockburn has gathered ideas for handling Agile contracts, and the team at OpenPlans has put together a list of resources which can help you understand how things are already done by others.

The idea is to choose whatever is best for your client and you. If the set of requirements is very stable, you could just go for the waterfall approach, yet by choosing Scrum you’re giving the freedom back to the client. He might feel after a while that common-sense changes should occur; by letting him know this from the beginning and negotiating the way they should be taken care, you can only gain credibility and confidence.

On the other hand, if your client has a great business idea but is not decided on how to bring it to the market, Scrum is definitely the best choice for you to refine and implement it together as a team, gathering measurable results all the way through.

And if your team is geographically distributed, you might want to watch Jeff Sutherland presenting an example of outsourced development team.

I hope you are now more confident on how to choose the right methodology for your project. I would love to hear back your arguments of choosing one path or the other.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Gerald Weinberg

Copy and paste is a design error.

David Parnas
 

Think about how you develop your own code.

Do you rush into writing a piece of code and use comments later, if you have any time left? Or do you use a pseudocode approach by writing comments n the first place and then developing functionality to implement that?

Do you develop code in such a way that it can be later tested and mainained? Or do you write it, prove “it works” and think about it next time you have to adjust functionality?

Do you favor speed for maintainability?

These are the lessons one learns while reading Code Complete, a book which aims to learn you how to do stuff right, not “just do it”. I like it more and more while I’m reading it. Most of the examples present common-sense development, yet I’ve seen so much poor code which does the job that I would like to reccommend it to all software developers. If you do read it, I can only promise it’ll make you a better colleague than you already might be.

If you emphasize quality at the beginning of the project, you plan for, require, and design a high-quality product. If you start the process with designs for a Pontiac Aztek, you can test it all you want to, and it will never turn into a Rolls-Royce. You might build the best possible Aztek, but if you want a Rolls-Royce, you have to plan from the beginning to build one. In software development, you do such planning when you define the problem, when you specify the solution, and when you design the solution.

Since construction is in the middle of a software project, by the time you get to construction, the earlier parts of the project have already laid some of the groundwork for success or failure. During construction, however, you should at least be able to determine how good your situation is and to back up if you see the black clouds of failure looming on the horizon. The rest of this chapter describes in detail why proper preparation is important and tells you how to determine whether you’re really ready to begin construction.

I just started delving into “Code Complete” and it’s fun and fascinating to read. I think that everyone involved in the software development process should understand the implications of every aspect. The time when we said “web applications should go to the market as fast as they can” is now gone. I do agree that in the web world things are moving pretty fast, but who will use a buggy / mis-designed software just because its authors wanted to get the first slice?

A-ha! So it is just another way of organizing one team’s work.

Well, not quite “yet another way of…”. It provides a framework for applying all the Agile good practices.

What can it do for me? It can help building quality products on time.

So you are saying that the requirements can effectively be changed while the team is implementing a project? And that there can be working sofware while they are building it?

What do I need to know in order to get started? There are some terms which will be used while analyzing / deciding / using Scrum, so it really is important to define them. Let’s get started…

Scrum is made of small iteration, known as Sprints. These are well-defined period of time adjusted to each team / organization, and can be anything from a week to a month long. They are meant to provide deliverables as a sum of features implemented in this period of time, and are presented to the ProductOwner who in turn decides what other features are to be implemented further in the next sprint and which actual features of the prototype are to be refined in the future.

Pig role: ProductOwner – this is the person which holds the business perspective. He/she knows what product is to be build, and what features it should have, but has no technical knowledge as how to build it.

Pig role: ScrumMaster – is the glue-maker. This one is the enforcer of rules. Ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended (all the Scrum rules, the implementation of the required items from the ProductBacklog, and all the programming practices which ensure the quality of software are respected) and lifts any barriers which come in front of the Team.

Pig role: Team – the hard-working people who build the actual product. 

Chicken roles: these are the traditional Users, Business and Stakeholders. They are the ones which use and / or benefit of the product being built. In the Scrum process, they provide useful and relevant feedback while the product is being built.

How is work actually organized? All the good Agile practices must be applied inside the sprint iterations. During them, the usual iterative development processes take place (analysis of requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment).

Every project developed using Scrum starts with a ProductBacklog, which is a set of features of the product, organized by importance (must-have, would-have, nice-to-have). Each of these 3 lists is then prioritized, and the result is a priority-ordered list of features, each having a very rough time estimate associated. Everyone can edit this list by adding new features. The ProductOwner is the one who defines priorities. The time estimates are extremely important for him / her in prioritizing the list.

The SprintBacklog is an extremely detailed document which provides information on how the team is going to implement the requirements for the upcoming sprint. Tasks are broken down into hours with no task being more than 16 hours.

Every day during a Sprint, a ScrumMeeting is held, following strict guidelines previously chosen to meet the specifics of the Team. It takes place always at the same location, has a fixed time on which it occurs, and must take no longer than a predefined period of time (usually 15 minutes). Only the pig roles arre allowed to speak, but anone can attend. Each pig roles should answer these questions:

1. What have you done since yesterday?
2. What are you planning to do by tomorrow?
3. Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal?