Hardening Sprints. What are they? Do you need them?

For anyone who is developing software using Scrum, XP or another incremental development approach, the idea of a “hardening sprint”…

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Classic Mistakes in Software Development and Maintenance

…the only difference between experienced and inexperienced developers is that the experienced ones realize when they’re making mistakes. Jeff Atwood,…

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Don’t take the Technical Debt Metaphor too far

Because “technical debt” has the word “debt” in it, many people have decided that it makes sense to think and…

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Rule of 30 – When is a method, class or subsystem too big?

A question that constantly comes up from people that care about writing good code, is: what’s the right size for…

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Why Scrum Won

In the 1990s and early 2000s a number of different lightweight ‘agile’ development methods sprung up. Today a few shops…

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Predictability – Making Promises you can Keep

Speed – being first to market, rapid innovation and conducting fast cheap experiments – is critically important to startups and…

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Health Checks, Run-time Asserts and Monkey Armies

After going live, we started building health checks into the system – run-time checks on operational dependencies and status to…

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You can’t Refactor your way out of every Problem

Refactoring is a disciplined way to clarify, retain or restore the design of a system as you make changes, and…

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Should you care about Conway’s Law?

Conway’s Law says that “organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which…

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