Managers were measured directly in terms of the value their team added to the organisation, and not simply by the numbers that they manage!

What a surprise to be asked by someone at a client from a different department to run an agile workshop. It’s a great sign that some people want to hear more about it, and even greater to be recommended by a fellow client developer to run it.

When foo people don’t know how to name things, they call it XXXXImpl. Worse yet are those that perhaps call it Standard. How about you use Default? If there is any deviation, at least people will know about it.

Kent Beck really should have titled XP Explained as “Embrace Change for the Better” instead of simply “Embrace Change” because I have seen too many misconstrue this as:

Embrace Change…

• Because I have to (I’ve been told to);
• For the sake of it (I don’t know why I’m doing it);
• Since I heard it was good (But I don’t bother to see if it’s helping);

Agile is more about the mindset than it is a methodology.

I’ve been heads down at work lately developing a desktop application, something that is a bit refreshing considering I’ve mainly been working on web applications or distributed systems for some time. Desktop applications have some nice things but developing them also means they have their own fair share of pain (acceptance testing a multithreaded app is not fun!).

The last time I had developed anything remotely serious desktop wise was back during University days when I was using Borland’s JBuilder 2 (yes that means Java 1.1 and AWT) and then slightly later, the terrible Microsoft’s J++ (and non-java classes). I have repeated found that IDEs are wonderful things for building prototype UIs, but anyone who has had the horror of maintaining any of the automagically created code in the background, will agree with me at how terrible it can be.

Not willing to repeat mistakes of the past, on my current project we have had great successes leveraging the JGoodies Forms Layout Manager. The makers of this opensource component specifically designed it with maintenance and addressing the common tasks of simple forms without being excessively verbose about it. They have an excellent white paper on their site and their APIs are intuitive, but I thought it might be useful stepping through a step by step guide anyway. Read more “The Goodness in JGoodies is Great: A Brief Tutorial”

There is only so much you can tell someone how something can improve, and I find it a much more effective technique showing them and doing it with them, and explaining the benefits that they can get. Take the following white board exercise for example (text has been blurred on purpose).

From this…

to this…

and so much more to go!