Thought Spearmints

"No roadblocks."

Don't let your Scrum go stale.

At work, "No roadblocks" had become not just the answer to the third Scrum question, but almost a sort of punctuation to let the team know that the current pig is done speaking (useful, perhaps, for the team members participating via conference call).  Maybe this is a good problem to have, no one having any roadblocks.  But it could also be that your team isn't talking about the tough issues confronting it, especially if correlated with declining velocity or other indicators.

We ended up tweaking the questions a bit -- the third question is now something along the lines of "Do I need any help completing a task and/or am I available to help with the completion of another task?"

(It's still kind of fun to say "No roadblocks" at the end of a rant at lunch, and such.  8^))

CITCON North America 2008 in Denver

I attended CITCON North America in Denver this weekend.  I went to last year's North American offering in Dallas/Fort Worth (my turf) and had a great time, learned a lot, and met some really smart, passionate software professionals.  Second verse -- same as the first. 

CITCON (pronounced KIT-kon) attracts a number of thought leaders in the areas of continuous integration, testing, and agile methods.  The Open Space format means that participants get out of the conference what they put into it -- they create their own agenda.  So I, along with the other attendees, proposed topics to fits into one of five different time slots in one of five different conference rooms.

The sessions I attended:

• Selenium vs. Watir -- Good discussion around the relative merits, pain points, and constraints of these two open-source web testing tools.
• BDD vs. TDD -- The motivations behind moving toward behavior-driven development and lingo as opposed to the more developer-facing TDD counterparts.
• Test-Driven Web Development -- Discussion around what a more test-centric approach to creating complex web applications might look like.
• Continuous Testing -- My colleague Ben Rady gave a great demo of his Infinitest tool.
• A session about DSLs for testing and executable specifications.  Good talk about RSpec and easyb, featuring Andy Glover and another colleague of mine, Rod Coffin.

I actually put the "Law of Two Feet" to good use after a session I kicked off had run its course after about forty minutes.  8^)

As a software professional, you owe it to yourself to attend this conference.

Tech catch phrases that beat me down

A committee at Lake Superior State University in Michigan publishes a list of overused words and phrases every year.  On this year's list are "battleground state," "...and I approve this message," and "carbs," among others.  It got me thinking about some of the things I hear in my work as a software developer that beat me down.  Here are a few:

• Orders of magnitude.  Just a fancy way of saying tenfold/hundredfold/thousandfold/...

• Works on my machine (or WOMM).  The least helpful thing you can say to someone struggling to get a software application to work on their machine.
• It works.  Oh yeah?  Show me your tests, running, quickly, all green.  Can I look at your code and understand it readily?  Is the design well-factored, loosely coupled, cohesive, coherent?  Would you be proud to show the code you wrote at a job interview?  On what basis?
• It doesn't work.  Oh yeah?  Under what circumstances?  What specific steps can I follow to reproduce the issue, if any?  What is the expected behavior?  If I understand these things, then I can write an automated test to expose the fault, then fix the code, then never have to worry about that problem again, ever.  Without these things, I've very little hope of solving the problem.

What are some of your tech-phrase beat-downs?