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The Two Metrics that Matter This article is designed to provide specific steps for understanding your development effectiveness. Getting this right will help move your software development group toward being a true business partner, if it is not already.
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Continuous Integration and the Automated Database Update Process Developers must have good feedback to ensure productivity. Most shops have a continuous integration (CI) build process that allows the developer to quickly know if a build failed, and some shops have an automatic deploy of the CI build to provide website feedback. Lance Lyons writes about an approach to automating the update of databases in a CI environment.
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Feature Injection: Part Two The tag-line for Feature Injection is "As we pull value from a system, we inject features." So before we can start, we need to identify the business value. But how do we do that? This edition also expands on the 20/20 vision conference concept.
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My Experience with Test-Driven Development Vinay Krishna explains why agile development includes testing and coding concurrently, which is also what test-driven development emphasizes. The transformation from coder to developer to tester is needed in all agile software development projects.
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Becoming Lean: The Why, What, and How This article presents a different way of looking at lean software development; one that is independent of lean’s manufacturing heritage. It begins by presenting lean as a collection of a body of knowledge applying lean principles to software development.
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Feature Injection: Part One We are leaving the "last responsible moment" for a while. This month we start a discussion of Feature Injection, an analysis process based on real options and Kolb's circle of learning. The first episode ( of five ) introduces the "Information Arrival Processes.
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What Software Developers Can Learn from Their Cafeteria Did you know that Starbucks sells a cup size called "short"? It's a small cup that is less expensive than the other cup sizes. They never mention it on their menu; you have to know it exists before you can order one. Why? By having a smaller, cheaper option, they give their budget-conscious customers an opportunity to pay for coffee rather than go without. This kind of thinking has important repercussions to software developers.
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Refactoring Doesn’t Mean Rewrite Peter Schuh writes that it is not a good thing that the use of the term refactoring has grown so common, which makes him cringe every time he hears a business person say the word. Refactoring is meant to be one skill of many that is second-nature to a journeyman programmer.
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Agile Processes: Making Metrics Simple IT organizations and, in particular, application development departments, are increasingly under pressure to provide performance and compliance metrics to justify annual spend. Unfortunately, many metrics campaigns collapse under their own weight.
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Structure Marking Structure marking is a programming technique that defends data against damage, especially from software bugs. It adds flags to data structures and checks them at each use to detect damaged data immediately.
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