Dan North - Agile Troublemaker, Developer, Originator of BDD

Some teams are orders of magnitude more effective than others. Kent Beck famously described himself as "not a great programmer, but a good programmer with great habits".

Patterns of Effective Delivery

If someone can't tell you where something doesn't apply, they don't understand it yet. Or they are selling you something.

Patterns are for naming things that you see.

Best Practices are for beginners. Patterns for advanced people.

Spike and Stabilize

A Spike is an experiment - timeboxed; it will be thrown away

A Spike is like an "option" in the financial world. It gives us a right, but not an obligation.

Test Driven Testing

Hair Trigger

The Ability of a team to deploy its own code

This means the team can go quickly and it can also screw up quickly.

If there is a requirement for multiple people to review the code that settles some of the legal issues this might create.

Ginger Cake

Ginger Cake: Like chocolate cake just with ginger.

Copy-paste code to get start quickly. From code you know really well.

Structured Ginger cake

Behavioral Ginger cake

Ginger cake is the opposite of DRY

The dark side of DRY is coupling

Shallow Silos

Silos are bad, cross-functional teams are good. No, there is spectrum.

Small sub-teams with common stand-ups



Burn the Ships

Burn the Ships: Force your people to move forward by eliminating the way back.

Set specific goals with specific dead-lines.

dead-line

no other options (can't back out)

information

For a paradigm shift (e.g. moving to agile) you need 3 things: