Elephant Carpaccio

I co-facilitated Alistair Cockburn's elephant carpaccio exercise yesterday. This is an exercise to teach developers and business analysts: How to slice large applications into 1-day to 1-week requests, from the business perspective How to slice application requests into 15-30 minute work slices, from both the business and programming perspective Previously, there had been some discussion at work … Continue reading Elephant Carpaccio →

Agile Applications with Java

I've been re-reading a couple of resources on modern application design: The Twelve-Factor App Java Doesn't Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong Those links contain a huge amount of distilled knowledge and advice on how we should build applications today. If you're working on applications that don't follow the advice in those articles, take … Continue reading Agile Applications with Java →

TIM Group University

I left my job at TIM Group at the end of March, after working there for a bit less than four years. I'm calling it TIM Group University, as my four years there taught me more than I can easily enumerate. Over the years I worked with a huge number of smart people, and felt … Continue reading TIM Group University →

Practical Lightweight Architecture

I recently read Simon Brown's post Getting to a software architecture quickly, which is itself a response to Victor Grgic's post "Think big, act small" - what does it mean in architecture?. I fully recommend Simon and Victor's approach; it's pretty much the same I've been using recently. This post is an expansion of the … Continue reading Practical Lightweight Architecture →

Coming Soon: CITCON London 2010

The European version of CITCON (the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) had a last minute change of plan, and has switched locations to London! This is one of my favourite conferences (see my notes on 2006 and 2009), and I'm really happy to see it coming back to London. Registrations have only been open for a week, but … Continue reading Coming Soon: CITCON London 2010 →

Not Agile 2010

On a whim, I joined some of my work colleagues going to XTC. Tonight was a special event: Not Agile 2010. For those of us who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't go to the Agile 2010 conference in Florida, we had an evening of lighting talks from anyone able stand upright and speak anything that sounded vaguely like English. … Continue reading Not Agile 2010 →

XPDay 2009

I've just registered for XPDay 2009. I last went to XPDay 2005, and had a blast. I regret not going back since, but I'll be there this year, at least!

Kanban at XtC

I've just noticed that the Extreme Tuesday Club is has Kanban presentations tomorrow (29th September). Given I'm a complete newbie on anything Kanban, I'll definetly turn up to that one.