Skiing as an agile vs waterfall metaphor
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: January 31st, 2010
I was asked by one of my clients to give a short introduction into Agile. As we did not have an appropriate presentation for this kind of audience and knowledge level I decided to create a new presentation. And while I was thinking of a good metaphor to compare traditional waterfall against agile methodologies the pictures of my recent snowboarding trip caught my eye and it hit me; Skiing (or snowboarding) is a very good metaphor to compare both methodologies.
It has the same characteristics as a project in that once you get started it just keeps on going; There are other projects (or skiers) in your way, environments change and conditions might not be what you expected them to be.
Let's see how it works out:
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Is debugging a skill?
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh mid-afternoon: September 25th, 2009
Recently someone asked me how I came to be so good in debugging things. I was a bit startled by the question as I was not aware of it being something you could be good at. But some people are better at finding problems then others, so I guess it must be true. This is my attempt at trying to figure out what debugging is and how you can get better at it.
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The worst thing about Waterfall
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh around lunchtime: August 27th, 2009
Last week, after one of our bi-weekly Xebia Knowledge Exchange meetings when we should have been having a beer chatting about cars and sport, a few fellow Xebians and I were having a beer chatting about agile vs waterfall. The conversation quickly turned to the question "what is the worst part about waterfall."
In the end we settled on "Incentivizing (is that a word?) parts of the chain instead of the whole".
Let me explain.
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Culture is the new Process
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh mid-morning: July 27th, 2009
Over the years I have seen many attempts to increase software quality. Most of our clients try to increase software quality by introducing a quality process. It usually involves a combination of strict coding guidelines, code reviews, checklists, acceptance criteria based on things like PMD, Checkstyle and Findbugs and audits by external parties amongst others.
But what struck me a couple of weeks ago is that we, as Xebia, have little extensive formal quality process. That is, while we have do have a lot of best practices and we test and measure quality a lot, we never have to resort to 'enforcing' quality.
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Technical debt is just like.. well debt
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh around lunchtime: November 15th, 2008
About 2 years ago I first heard the term "technical debt" from one of my coworkers. Well, I heard technical depth instead of debt first, which clearly did not help me see why it was such a great term for crappy code and quick and dirty solutions.
What exactly is software quality?
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: November 5th, 2008
That is what I would like to find out today. If you ask a group of developers what it is, the only thing they will agree on is that it is important. Managers will tell you they want high-quality software, but only because it is politically correct to do so. They are more than willing, and usually even eager, to trade in this mysterious quality for more functionality or performance when it is needed.
And who can blame them? What is the business case for something you can not even explain?
We know beautiful code when we see it, but how do we write beautiful software? And the even better question, why would we care?
JMeter vs NeoLoad
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the early evening: October 29th, 2008
Recently I was asked by a client to introduce performance testing into their development process.
They have 1 week iterations where they integrate the different components of their system and they wanted to performance test the end-result every other week.
Starting out small and simple I downloaded JMeter from apache, fired up their recording proxy, recorded a scenario, changed all the relevant form fields into regex variables and off I went.
It worked great, we had some interesting data with some nice graphs to show performance was okish.
But the happiness didn't last long..
Commitment
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh mid-afternoon: July 18th, 2008
A few weeks ago I was asked to explain Scrum and how our Agile Offshore Delivery Model works to one of our new sales guys.
During the session he asked me the question: "What does a client have to do to make a project done this way successful?"
Best of Xebia Offtopic List: Mice in the Office
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh at around evening time: September 27th, 2007
Hello everyone,
Today I would like to make an exception to not report our usual serious, high quality discussions on our technical list, but to bring you a gem on our offtopic list. The original discussion was in Dutch because it was sent to the dutch mailing list, but I will try to translate, if only for our Indian and French coworkers who had to witness the Dutch on the offtopic list, where it was quickly taken..
Apologies in advance for any translation errors..
Best of Xebia tech list: Hibernate Cascade Question
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the early afternoon: September 21st, 2007
I am sorry I am a bit behind on posting the techlist questions, but I have been a bit busy lately with tons of different projects.
This time we have a hibernate question..
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