The Definition of Definition of Done

TL;DR

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What-If Daily Scrums

I agree with Michael Kennedy when he says that Software Development could be modeled as a Knowledge Discovery Process, “the process of going from 0% knowledge about an idea to 100% knowledge of a finished product ready for delivery to a customer“.

I agree so much that I decided to adapt my future Daily Scrums to this.

In Introducing Deliberate Discovery Dan North quoted this story:

Principles and Rules

Some weeks ago I gave a talk at AgileDay.it. My talk was about a weird experimental Kanban board, and the Leitmotiv I used was around the differences between Principles and Rules. The topic was: we often learn methodologies mocking rules (often, without getting the point) rather than trying to understand the principles behind them. This bad habit sometimes leads us to take really dumb decisions.

Well, if only I had seen then what I saw today, I would have used in my talk, since I think it would have been the perfect example.

See what I found in a recent production code.
Right now, it hangs on the wall of our open space, for all the developers to see.

Preemptive commit comments

tl;dr version

Rule #1: write commit comments before coding
Rule #2: write what the software should be supposed to do, not what you did

You won’t believe how old TDD is

Kent Beck is credited as the the TDD inventor.
Yet, he claims he just re-discovered it.

3 Questions About Software and Manufacturing Industry

I would have liked to reply to Susana Cabaço who wrote an interesting comment to my post Please Stop Saying Software Is An Intangible Product.
I wasn’t able to be concise enough. Since Susana’s question made me think of three other questions which I do not know the answers, I’m sharing them with you all.

Please, Stop Saying Software Is An Intangible Product

Find here the follow-up of this post.

I find it vaguely irritating when the abused image in which software is described as an intangible product is used.

Software is, of course, intangible as of dictionary definition (“Incapable of being perceived by the senses, Incorporeal“) since it’s made of bits and bits obviously cannot be touched.

But this is not the abuse I’m talking about. The annoying cliché used in tons of posts and articles speciously refers to another meaning, and it’s very often used by-end.