O'Reilly News & Commentary

David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices - Finding a Good Mentor is Key

By James Turner
September 29, 2009

If you're a senior developer with years of experience under your belt, it may be hard to remember what it was like coming out of college with a newly minted CS degree, and entering the workplace. But as David Hoover argues, helping these newcomers to the workforce to succeed can be the difference between effective, motivated developers and confused, discouraged ones. Hoover is the author of the new O'Reilly book Apprenticeship Patterns, and he says that people coming right out of college may, in fact, be less motivated than someone who has been working for a while.

Agile's Next Challenge: Selling it to the Business

By Timothy M. O'Brien
September 24, 2009

Agile's next challenge is selling executives on the idea of rapid iterative development without rigorous up-front planning. As Agile becomes a default mode of the development for most technology departments, it will need to be properly positioned in the Board room. How will Agile's evolution affect the way that the business views technology as a "profession".

Review: "Scaling Lean & Agile Development", by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

By Ed Willis
August 18, 2009

I've managed a group that ran software projects using Scrum but also provided Scrum support to the wider R&D organization by developing Scrum templates and procedures, developing and delivering Scrum training and providing coaching and mentoring for groups taking their first steps down the Scrum path. So, to be honest, I pretty much figured I had Scrum licked. Then I read "Scaling Agile & Lean Development" by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. I'd yet to scratch the surface of lean and so the excellent treatment lean gets in this book was expected to be new to me, but it was pretty embarrassing how much I learned about Scrum and agile development along the way. If anything it left me feeling a bit of an agile fraud. In the introduction to "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter talks about how reading Alexandrescu's work made him realize that his understanding of C++ templates was still at the "container of T" level while Alexandrescu's work opened his mind to the vast possibilities offered by C++'s generics. This book leaves me feeling similarly abut agile methods. The book presents a great treatment of agile and lean development methods, places them in the context of queuing theory and lean thinking and provides a road map for configuring the organization in what will be a novel manner for most of us but a manner which has led Toyota and others to remarkable improvements in efficiency, employee satisfaction and responsiveness to market needs. If you're an agile practitioner and proponent, go get this book - you'll be glad you did. Note that a companion volume, "Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development" is due out soon also.

Welcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team

By Tim O'Reilly
May 26, 2009

The Radar blog is a community of thinkers organized around the O'Reilly mission to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Some of the folks with posting privileges on Radar are O'Reilly employees, others work part-time with us, and others are interesting people we have met along the journey. They are people who've stimulated our thinking and helped us reflect on areas we want to learn about. In each case the goal is the same - talk about "Stuff That Matters" and generate meaningful conversation. With that in mind, I wanted to welcome Eric Ries to the Radar community.

Applying Lean to Software Development, an Excerpt from The Art of Software Development

By Sara Peyton
January 28, 2009

Just checking out The Art of Lean Software Development, which is based on the techniques that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing. Written by Curt Hibbs, Steve Jewett, and Mike Sullivan, this concise new title shows you how to adopt Lean practices one at a time. And in this excerpt the authors discuss the importation relationship between Lean and Agile.

Analysis 2009: Government Gets Into the Software Business

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

The incoming Obama administration has, even before taking office formally, pledged between $650 and $800 billion dollars worth of public works initiatives, a massive shift away from the laissez faire approach of the outgoing Bush administration. Of that, it...

Sustainability, Boxing Day, and Open Source Software

By Kurt Cagle
December 28, 2008

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.

Throwing Money at Problems: More Thoughts on Bailouts

By Kurt Cagle
December 15, 2008

Government absolutely must play a role in dealing with companies that are too big to fail ... it must prevent them from reaching that point. Until that happens, real reform in business will be slow and problematic.

Is Telework the Face of the Agile Workforce?

By Kurt Cagle
August 3, 2008

The idea that twenty-somethings have to commute an hour plus each way to an office and work eight hours a day in a cubicle seems absurd to them. As they become the work force, expect the days of the cubicle to become numbered.

Understanding XML: Thoughts on Agile Schema Development

By Kurt Cagle
June 28, 2008

In truth, XML Schema design (and general data modeling, for that matter) benefit strongly from Agile methodologies, but it needs to be understood that whereas the end point of agile development for imperative code is a working (and dynamically adaptable application), the end point for declarative schema development is ultimately a solid data model first and foremost. Indeed, I think that this is one of the fundamental differences that XML development has from most other forms of computer programming; in "traditional agile", the design phase is something that tends to be subsumed into the development - indeed, the idea of designing too deeply at the outset of development is a major no-no in agile programming, since in essence one of the tenets of agile development is that the design process is an evolutionary one that runs in tandem with application creation. With XML, however, what you are in fact creating is an expression of a data model - that is the target, which means that the XML developer in fact spends an inordinate amount (perhaps the entire) part of the development cycle in the design phase.

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