Preserve All Cash Until Needed. Then Spend.

Mark: Yeah. And I actually think the Agile revolution in software development is software development catching up to the fact that it’s a writer-ly art. Writers don’t know where they’re going or how they’re going to express it when they start out. Neither, it turns out, does software developers. They can pretend by writing it the first time in a spec language and then coding it and then, checking the specification, then finding out that they’ve written the wrong thing and writing a new specification. That was when I was getting started, the right way to write software.

Any software developer will recognize it, The Eureka Moment. This is when you suddenly see how to solve a particular problem. We have them in all shapes and sizes and at the strangest moments. How does that work in SCRUM and DevOps teams?

agile development that has rapidly spread from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley. It's a system of group dynamics in which workers are organized into small teams, hold daily progress sessions and weekly reviews

Google killed SG&E about one year after Stadia launched, before the studio had released a game or done any public work. In a blog post announcing Stadia's pivot to a "platform technology," Stadia VP Phil Harrison explained the decision to shutter SG&E, saying, "Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially."

Agile as a methodology is designed to be adaptive to multiple conditions and drivers to enhance the speed of delivery, but it is most successful when the organisation adopting it understands its own in-built cadence, i.e. its specific rhythm of project delivery.

The number one problem that I see developers have when practicing test-first development that impedes them from refactoring their code is that they over-specify behavior in their tests. This leads developers to write more tests than are needed, which can become a burden when refactoring code.

Write modules quickly, to meet your needs, with just a few tests for compliance. Avoid extensive specifications.

Programming to interfaces is at the core of flexible structure.

Rather than implement features you might need, you implement only the features you definitely need, but in a way that accommodates change. If you don't have this flexibility, parallel development simply isn't possible.

At the core of parallel development, however, is the notion of flexibility. You have to write your code in such a way that you can incorporate newly discovered requirements into the existing code as painlessly as possible.

many successful projects have proven that you can develop high-quality code more rapidly (and cost effectively) this way than with the traditional pipelined approach

Dave Thomas

The Agile Software Development Process – How We Do It

Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent. We live in these boxes, as pervasive as oxygen, and as inflexible as punched cards.

I made a number of adjustments based on midterm feedback