I will try in the following to explain my preferred way of developing software. I hope you will find it interesting and useful. Trust The most important part is getting a capital of trust from the customer right from the beginning, for the sake of all people involved in the project. If there’s no trust, it’s better to run away because the team and the product will get hurt. Once I get...
Laurie Young, Robert Dempsey and myself had a conversation about product and customer development. Some of the questions that we asked were: Is Scrum the best way of producing software? Are cycles preferred by developers over flow? (e.g. Scrum over Kanban) How do you tackle starting a product? Does learning ever stop? and many more. I think the conversation is interesting because it goes over the...
Here are some of the things we’ve learned about running a code retreat. We’ve facilitated about 10 code retreats, including one with Corey Haines.The smallest one was with two (yes, two) people and the largest with about 20. Here are some of the things we learned. Don’t try to convince people Many developers who took part in code retreats tried to talk to their colleagues or...
I had a lot of recurrent conversations over why we should use automatic testing, unit testing or TDD. Through these conversations, I’ve heard a lot of arguments pro and con to these techniques, so I decided to summarize them. To be honest, I am very passionate about TDD. I believe this technique is a must know for every developer who’s serious about his or her craft. Despite my...
You can find here links to some of the most interesting sites and articles that I read. Paul Graham’s essays – I believe that Paul Graham is a genius. Not only did he left his mark on software development, but he also funded Y!Combinator, a venture capitalism company specialized in technology start-ups, and, as if this wasn’t enough, he writes perfect, both in form and in...