Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

If you've ever struggled to test code that involved sleeping threads or infinite loops, you might find these techiques helpful...

Posted by Dave [Link]

I've been solving one of ThoughtWorks' coding problems this weekend in order to learn a bit about Tiger. I'm impressed and very relieved. Enums, Autoboxing, Generics, For-Each ... they all work together to remove some of the most awkward idiosyncrasies of Java (from this Perl hacker's humble opinion). I still have more new features to play with...

Posted by Dave [Link]

This week I participated in one of my all-time favorite pair programming sessions. Dave Astels and I tasked ourselves with the final task in a user story that I had been working on for a few days. We needed to wire together all of the previously completed tasks in the simplest way possible.

We drove our solution with our favorite tools IDEA and JMock, taking very small steps. We developed our usual rhythm: one of us writes a test, the other makes it pass, then immediately writes a test, and the first gets it to pass. Repeat. Complimenting our rhythm, we developed a grumpy, early-morning banter. This banter led us to take even smaller steps, as we tried to out-lazy each other a few times, getting to a green bar with as little code as possible.

A few hours later, our grumpiness had disappeared but our rhythm had remained steady. We were excited by what had emerged. Our design was so simple, it almost felt wrong. I felt very proud of it.

Posted by Dave [Link]

Alan and his family are moving to Austrialia for a while. This means Alan won't be able to attend AYE ... and he has graciously offered me his slot! I'm very excited about hanging out with fellow ThoughtWorker Tim and getting to know many other AYE and SHAPE folks.

Posted by Dave [Link]

I've been enjoying Jim Coplien's excellent Organizational Patterns. One of the patterns is Stand-Up Meeting, a foundational practice of agile approaches like XP and Scrum. I was surprised when I read the following quote on page 292:

"Note that one way to keep an organization stable is through a Stand-Up Meeting, where managers get frequent status from everyone. That pattern highlights the dangers of allowing ongoing daily meetings to perpetuate the crisis mentality. Such meetings are fine for redressing short-term crises, but prolonged recurrence of very frequent status meetings can create a crisis mentality. Every developer can relate to this problem..."

I haven't made it any further into the book. I pick it up and re-read that quote and it makes me wonder. I'm a huge fan of daily stand-up meetings, but when I read something like that in a book I highly respect, it gives me pause.

Can anyone relate to this quote from page 249?

"But there is a potential danger with such meetings. In some organizations, particularly where such tight communication is not the norm, daily meetings are instituted in response to a crisis. While the meetings give morale a temporary lift, they are subject to -- and contribute to -- burnout."

Maybe I simply haven't been in the business long enough, but I've never felt stand-up meetings contributing to burnout.

Posted by Dave [Link]

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