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. It is not wise to apply (a) principle ... if there is no symptom. In this section Uncle Bob discusses the Single Responsibility Principle...

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...

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...

ThoughWorks Studios has released an ebook titled “How do you estimate on an Agile project?” where they explore common approaches and their adaptions from real-world projects.  The book is comprised of several authors, most notably Martin Fowler. In this ebook they discuss why teams estimate, different methods that teams use...

Over the last year or so software development estimates have become a popular topic.  The popularity stems from the inherent fact that estimating software development is difficult.  Some people are writing about ways to improve your estimates while others are writing about how to manage software development without estimates. Those...

Now we will cover the fun stuff for which we’ve been waiting. In this post, I’ll go over how to setup Sonar for a Java project that utilizes Ant for its build.  I’ll go through the basic steps for installing and running a Sonar instance, and how to use a...