APM Tooling Survey and XPlanner

Trail Ridge Consulting has released the results of an agile project management tooling survey performed in late 2006. Apparently, APM tools are being widely used by both small and large organizations although the primary reasons differ with the size of the organization. It was interesting to me to see that card-based approaches are use less [...]

Pair Programming Benefits and Costs

A new pair programming study (Arisholm et al. 2007) indicates that that the practice neither increases quality or reduces costs, in general. “The results of this experiment do not support the hypotheses that pair programming in general reduces the time required to solve the tasks correctly or increases the proportion of correct solutions. On the [...]

Are You an Effective Software Developer?

In a recent article I wrote about preferring Effective Software Development (ESD). I prefer being effective over being labeled as “agile” (whatever that might mean to you personally). This preference raises many questions for me. How do I define effectiveness? How do I know if I’m being effective or not? How can I become more [...]

“Agile” Without a Name

There’s been much discussion and debate in various forums about the evolving use of the word “agile” to describe software development. Some people involved in the discussion have suggested creating a new term to replace “agile”. In most cases, I don’t support replacing terminology. However, the term “agile” seems to have suffered so much semantic [...]