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David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices

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 23, 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".

Agile testing and Beautiful Teams (giveaway)

By Andrew Stellman
August 22, 2009

Testing -- especially on agile projects -- has been coming up a lot lately. Jenny and I have have spent a lot of time talking and writing about the basic ideas behind testing. So we were really excited when Abby...

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 23, 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: Brady Forrest organizes the ETech, Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo events, Mike Loukides, Andy Oram, Brett McLaughlin, and Mike Hendrickson are editors of many...

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

By Sara Peyton
January 27, 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.

Alan Cooper on Agile Software

By RJ Owen
September 3, 2008

Alan Cooper is an experienced software developer and interaction designer who's been around for a while. He runs a consulting firm, writes a lot of books, and is called the "father of Visual Basic." Alan Cooper has been on the forefront of experience design and software development for a while now. He's been in the trenches, seen what works and what doesn't, and now he's decided to share some of his experience on software process and why Agile software is best. Cooper was asked to deliver a keynote at the recent Agile 2008 conference, held in Toronto earlier this August. His slides with accompanying notes are available on his website, and make a really great presentation both for those already converted to agile methods and those who've heard the term but don't really know what it's about.