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Why don’t we collaborate more?

In an office environment, it’s always been obvious when there’s a major production problem. You’ll see everyone standing around a single desk; everyone working together on the same problem at the same time. If there’s a blocker to what they’re doing, one or more people in the group will immediately do something to remove that obstacle, to ensure that the main work continues uninterrupted.

The extreme in eXtreme Programming (XP)

My first exposure to anything Agile was with eXtreme Programming (XP) back in 1999. While it had many process steps similar to what Scrum and Kanban offer today, the thing that really differentiated XP was it’s focus on technical practices. It’s those technical practices that we are usually referring to when we talk about XP today.

The big rewrite

I remember once having two back-to-back clients who had just rewritten significant systems in their environment. I asked why they’d chosen to rewrite the system from scratch rather than just fixing them as they were.

Scouting rule

We often talk about the scouting rule of “always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it”, or in a software context “always leave the code a little bit better than you found it”.

Quality

The theme for this week seems to be quality so let’s look at some different aspects of that.

YAGNI (You Aren’t Going to Need It)

YAGNI (You Aren’t Going to Need It) is a principle that keeps us from over-engineering the system. Build today only those things that you need today. Things that we need tomorrow, we can build tomorrow.

Hot-fixes

It used to be common that we would have two different ways to deploy something to a production environment.