Revising the Development Process: Getting More Agile in a Real-World Project

When I started working at Guidewire, back in 2002, the company was all of 15 people, maybe 10,000 lines of code, and one unreleased product.  No one really knew anything about Test Driven Development or unit testing in general and we didn’t really have a continuous integration server, but we did attempt to generally follow [...]

Two Sprint Equations

What should be the order of items to do when installing a Sprint process from scratch? In the coaching days, we requested one to one ratio between the coaches and the rest of the developers plus a project manager, go all out for a couple of sprints, give everyone a chance to adjust to the [...]

Getting Back to Business Fundamentals

The economic news over the last few weeks has, obviously, been fairly grim, and after an initial shrug by Silicon Valley, over the last week or so it seems that everyone in the valley has started to realize that this really will, in fact, affect them, that VC and angel funding will dry up, that [...]

A More Clearly-Stated Version of My Argument

I was perhaps a little poorly stated and a little (intentionally) combative in my last post, so I figure I should clarify a few points.  Thanks to everyone who commented or otherwise pointed out errors in my reasoning, over-reaching statements, or other ways in which I’m wrong.  I think this is a subject upon which [...]

API Design

API design is hard. You can tell it is hard because there are so many bad API’s out there, often written by pretty smart people. Why is this?
I believe that one reason is that, in order to do APIs right, you often need to layer their complexity. This layering should make simple [...]

Don’t Believe the Hype

I should begin this with a disclaimer: while I normally try to make these posts well thought-out and to stick to subjects I know a lot about, this time around I’ll be getting a little less neutral and talking a little more about things I have limited experience with. I’m not a functional [...]