Blog Insights

I find that in software development, and also in life, people learn best within the context of painful experiences. I’m not suggesting that software development mentors go out of their way to create painful experiences for their teams. On the contrary, just start listening. It doesn’t take very long to identify...

I facilitated my own rendition of the #NoEstimates Puzzle Experiment for the September 2013 Agile Iowa user group meeting. This experiment was created by Chris Chapman to generate critical thinking and conversation concerning whether estimates are necessary to produce quality software. The meeting had a great turnout, with around 40...

Error handling is tricky. Not because it's especially hard to do, but because everyone (operations, the business team, fellow programmers) seems to have a different idea of how a particular situation should be handled. A web service is down? No problem. You should try again every five seconds, but no...

I was reminded of a profound truth as I was re-reading Robert C. Martin's book "Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices", in C# this time. In this section Uncle Bob discusses the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), which defines that a class should have only one reason, or axis, to change...

I was able to attend the Agile 2013 conference in Nashville, TN earlier this month. I had previously attended Agile 2006 in Minneapolis, MN. There was a significant difference. At this year's conference, the overall theme seemed to be that teams needed to focus on producing value rather than following a...

Is it really possible that intense planning and the ability to respond to change can co-exist within the same development process? If you are wondering this, then you are not alone. Partners regularly ask us if Agile software development teams follow any sort of plan or are they just feel...

One of the best software development conferences you can attend is the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) conference. The conference  is small and the speakers are mostly consultants working in the field.  I attended my 9th NFJS conference this year, and as always, came away with some great information that...

I had the opportunity to present at the eleventh Iowa Code Camp on June 8, 2013.  The title of my presentation was "Easy Acceptance Testing." The purpose of the presentation was to discuss an acceptance testing framework that Source Allies, Inc. developed for a partner while working on a large...

Do you ever wish that companies would trust their employees and business partners instead of insulating themselves with contracts and policies?  For many companies, each discipline operates out of its own department requiring other areas to document exactly what they want and what they are going to do.  This provides...

If you've tried to create an NUnitAddin that works with Resharper you quickly found that it simply doesn't work.  In fact, it's been confirmed that Resharper does not currently support NUnit EventListener addins.  While this is true, I've found a work around that works very nicely. Instead of adding an EventListener...