I don’t normally post just a link to another blog, but More thinking about “Agile” vs “Waterfall” by Jason Yip is just too important. It the most well-argued, well-referenced, short post I’ve seen about the subject. Here’s a taste: Be careful about saying that Waterfall is more disciplined. The wate...

Here is a wordle of my blog: (Inspired by Thomas Ferris)

Warnings are useful. You get warnings from your IDE when you write something that might be a bug. You have probably made your program print out warnings or error messages when something goes wrong. But too often, we down in the sheer volume of warnings. Then it’s impossible to separate the relevant ...

This Norwegian language post describes my response to the report from a task force exploring a common IT-architecture for the public sector in Norway. Den norske regjeringen har besluttet at en felles IKT-arkitektur for offentlig sektor ville være fint. Jeg fikk greie på arbeidet på tirsdag, og har ...

Sometimes it feels like I’m stating the obvious. But the fact that users only care about the interface of the service is something we often say, but seldom understand. If this is true, how can we think that we can develop the interface as an after though to the central system. Not all your users mig...

I am changing employers. As of October 1st, I will no longer be lead software architect at BBS Nordic. Instead, I will be the chief scientist at the Norwegian division of Steria. This weekend, I was invited to join my new employer at their gathering at a resort in the south of Norway. I’ve had a cha...

I’ve learned the value of dealing seriously with connecting requirements to the actual code. The JBehave project started work to make formal, “business friendly” requirements into executable specifications, but due to limitations in Java, it was very clunky to use. JBehave 2.0 has just been released...

I’ve looked over some of my code lately, and found ways that I often improve my tests. I’m planning on writing a blog post for each of my five favorites. First out: Using the data storage. I upgraded our API for billing customers. I had a few compilation errors in my code, as the API had changed som...

I just watched another amazing talk from the TED conference. Spencer Wells is a natural public speaker. He talks about where we all, as a species, came from. Amazingly enough, everyone who is alive today share a common ancestor in Africa no more than about 2000 generations, or 60,000 years ago. Well...

Looking back at my projects for the last two years, we’ve had a tremendous improvement in the way we’re working. There are many things that we have done to make it better, and I’m be hard pressed to pick just three things I’ve learned. After much consideration, my favorites are: Partial production; ...

When the building blocks of your program fail and you don’t notice, the problem can be very hard to diagnose. In most of my projects, the building blocks are the persistent objects. Using Hibernate makes it easy to create a data access layer, but if you don’t watch out, errors can sneak into equals ...

Stand up and be counted. Which one do you think is best of the following? Package by layer: com.app.controllers com.app.model com.app.repositories com.app.exception Or package by feature: com.app.orders com.app.invoices com.app.products I recently added a new site to my RSS reader. John O’Hanly just...

This Norwegian languauge article pertains to an article in the Norwegian news magazine “Ny Tid” and my letter to the editor. (Dette er mitt debattinnlegg som ble publisert i Ny Tid 11. juli. Innlegget er oppfølging til Christian Lundestads veldig gode artikkel om åpen kildekode i ny tid 27. juni.) S...

In Let your examples flow, Dan North describes how “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) isn’t necessarily the most important guideline for tests. While I agree with his conclusions, I think the DRY principle is still extremely important for tests. Dan’s point is that the most important attribute of tests i...

The TED conference has some amazing talks. If you never knew you were interested in car seats for children, classical music, or feet (yeah!), some of these talks will blow you mind. A recent video that really moved me was Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. His insights and in...

At the last meeting in Oslo Lean Meetup Geoff Watts talked about BTs transition to agility. The most memorable part to me was when BT transformed a huge, waterfall type project with a delivery schedule measured in years into an agile project. The project set out to convert all BT customers to a new ...

People always talk about how learning is something that happens in groups. Last week, I got reminded of the point as a task I had previously struggled with alone became trivial in a pair programming episode. The first time I tried coding “a bowling scoring program” was in 2001. I’ve practices the ex...

Three years ago, I was asked by one of our teams to give advice on how they should write a parser for a structured file format. Just having read up on SAX again, I recommended that they looked into designing it as a push parser. A push parser works by the design that the parser generates events each...

Warning: This article requires a lot of editing love before it is very useful. It might be somewhat incoherent. Read at your own risk. ;-) Silo (software): A silo system cannot easily integrate with any other system. In software, the term “silo” is used to refer to a system that is constructed as on...

This article is a Norwegian-language version of my article Four bold claims about SOA. Dette er et utkast til en artikkel jeg ønsker å få publisert. Jeg setter stor pris på tilbakemeldinger om uklare tanker og formuleringer. To av de vanskeligste problemene vi møter innen programvareutvikling er int...

In my last article, I showed how to implement authentication with Ruby on Rails. But security is about more than simple login. For many applications, we want to grant permission to manipulate a resource to a set of users. In this article, I will guide you though adding functionality so that users ca...

Three challenges for agile projects When I join projects now, I want to challenge all the stakeholders to make three commitments: Simulate production at least monthly: The software should be run in an environment that is comparable with the target production environment with loads and data variation...

As my previous Norwegian language article turned out to be one of the all time top hit articles in my blog, I will continue to write a few articles in Norwegian. This one is on an idea on how to do reseach on the success of agile projects. Next week, I will return to another popular topic: Testing. ...

What is the secret to happiness? Surprisingly, this question can be answered more and more definitively. I want my work to be conductive to the happiness of myself and others, and I believe agile methods can help me do that. Years of research into happiness can be summed up in a simple sentence. You...

Two of the hardest problems of software development are integration and what we could call business-IT alignment: The whole organization working towards the same goal. SOA claims to address both of these problems. After listening harder than I’ve ever done before to SOA evangelists, I think I unders...

When I give talks on agile, people often ask the inevitable question: “When is Agile not appropriate?” My response is that I don’t really care what people call what they do. What I am concerned about is the quality and frequency of the feedback that informs the control and decisions regarding projec...

This post is a Norwegian language summary of a talk I did April 14th, 2008 Jobber du smidig? Jeg jobber ikke smidig. Men jeg jobber smidigere enn jeg gjorde for tre måneder siden og enda mer smidig enn jeg jobbet for et år siden. Og om et år kommer jeg til å jobbe enda smidigere. Men Smidige metoder...

In my previous articles, I have showed you how to create a simple blog application with articles, comments, rss feeds and formatting. However, as it is currently written, the application allows for anyone to create or edit an article. This is a serious security issue, and we better fix it. In this t...

On my project, we use Maven to build our software and FitNesse to write functional specifications. However, it was obvious that FitNesse wasn’t designed by Maven-fans. When I use Maven, I already have control over my classpath, and specifying it in every FitNesse test gets to be old really fast. Why...

Anders Nordås wrote a blog post where he talks a little about how he uses his beautiful moleskin notebook. I will pick up his challenge and write about my favorite tool, Post It notes. As many who know me are aware, I always have a pad of Post-It notes and a pen in my left pants pocket. I use the st...