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Why TDD matters for product managers, product owners, and stakeholders

Co-authored by the badass Diana Villanueva Test Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique practiced by a portion of the developer community. In this article we are going to focus on the benefits TDD provides for product managers, product owners, and stakeholders. If you’re...

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Will you write less tests with Integrated or Unit tests?

In this article I’m going to talk about Unit/Solitary/Mockist/London Style and compare them to Integrated/Social/Classicist/Detroit Style tests. If you’re unfamiliar with these concepts, the terminology in Martin Fowler’s Unit Test article can be a good primer. Here’s...

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6 reasons you should NOT rotate developers onto new projects frequently

I believe that there are a lot of good reasons to rotate the developers at your company onto other projects more frequently than you already are. What I mean by “rotate” is that a team member is effectively moved from one project to another. This is usually in the form of a trade. A...

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8 reasons you should rotate developers onto new projects regularly

I believe that there are a lot of good reasons to rotate the developers at your company onto other projects more frequently than you already are. What I mean by “rotate” is that a team member is effectively moved from one project to another. This is usually in the form of a trade. A...

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I'm OK with some DRY violations. Here's why

If you haven’t heard of DRY, it stands for, “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and it says “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” I first learned about this principle in The Pragmatic Programmer and...

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6 effective ways to deal with Brooks' Law

Frederick Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man Month that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. This is also known as Brooks’ Law. One of the reasons for this is that each time you add more people to a project, the communication overhead...

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What it’s Like to Pair for a Year

Just wanted to share this article I wrote for my company blog. I think the readers of my personal blog would also be interested in it. What it’s Like to Pair for a Year

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Pair programming makes interruptions tolerable

Every programmer knows that interruptions are frustrating because it lowers their productivity. But now, there’s empirical evidence showing this: Game Developer Magazine analyzed 10,000 programming sessions recorded from 86 programmers using Eclipse and Visual Studio, and surveyed 414...

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An in depth guide to Extreme Single Responsibility Principle

Note: This is a more in depth look at an article I previously wrote titled, Intro to the Extreme Single Responsibility Principle. The previous article is not a prerequisite. I’m going to talk about a technique I picked up that I’ve never seen done anywhere except for where I...

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5 simple ways to plan better deadlines

I’ve been programming for more than a decade and what seems to be a sore point for other software engineers is deadlines. This can be because a Product Manager set an unrealistic deadline in the past and they had to go on a death march to deliver. If you’re a Product Manager, these...

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"It depends" is the answer to every interesting question. But why?

I’ve heard it said that every interesting question in software engineering has an answer that says, “It depends”. What I’ve realized recently is that this applies to a lot of questions that I would have normally considered uninteresting. Because of this, it’s...

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Extreme Single Responsibility Principle

I’m going to talk about a technique I picked up that I’ve never seen done anywhere except for where I currently work. Because I’ve been programming professionally for over a decade and this is the first time I’ve seen this, I figure it must be relatively unfamiliar to...

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Prioritize first, estimate second

It’s not uncommon to hear a PM say, “I’d like the development team to estimate how long it will take to implement these features so I can use that to determine how to prioritize them”. Earlier in my career, I would have considered this completely reasonable. After all,...

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Step 1: Developers Agree to Deadlines

Imagine you wanted someone to build you a house and they told you that it would take a year to build. “Unfortunately”, you tell them, “I already told my family that we’d be living in our new home in 3 months”. Of course they tell you they can’t build it on...

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Commit messages: Document "why" not "what"

Imagine you’re working in a well tested project and you’re assigned a new bug: “` GIVEN there’s a button to send a notification WHEN I click that button THEN I receive a “button clicked” notification that has an “id” and...

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Welcome to "Agile" the methodology where everything's made up and the points don't matter

Story points are a common practice in agile planning and in this article I wanted to talk about some of the theory and my personal experience with pointing. I’m going to assume that all readers are aware of what story points are. But, if you’re not, take a quick peek at the...

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A Bad PM Communicates like a Food Chain

As we discussed last week, A Good PM is a Communication Gateway. This is a diagram of how communication flows to and from a good PM (Product Manager): If you want to know more details about how a good PM interacts people around them, check out my previous blog post. This time I want to talk...