Duncan Pierce duncanpierce.org

I discovered this list of quotes by Winston Churchill. Churchill had a way with words, so I picked out a few quotes that seem to say something interesting about Agile development.

On feedback:

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

The Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) has moved to a new home at the Counting House, 50 Cornhill, London EC3V 3PD — another Fuller’s pub. We’ve been at the Old Bank of England for 8 years now and felt it was time to try somewhere new. For those of you at XPDay this year, this was the pub we were at on Tuesday night.

Javascript is a prototype-based language which has some slightly unusual semantics if you are used to languages like Java and C#. Classical OO inheritance isn’t trivial in Javascript – at least not conceptually. There are many webpages out there out there offering various solutions. Many of them propose complicated and strange answers to the problem, when actually it’s pretty simple.

This is the second time I’ve attended the Agile Business Conference (ABC). The first time was ABC’s inaugural year of 2005. I had some misgivings about the direction ABC was taking in 2005, but based on attending this year I think some things are improving.

Registration for XPDay 2007 is now open.

The XPDay programme committtee met last week and in a very well organized (by Angela Martin) meeting we agreed what I think is the strongest programme we’ve yet seen at the conference — more sessions, more tracks, more diverse topics. Keep an eye on the website for the full programme announcement.

If you’re thinking of submitting a session for XPDay, do it now! The final day for submissions is Tuesday 31st July.

Should you submit a session? We encourage you to share your ideas, knowledge and questions. Even if it’s incomplete; even if it’s bad news; even if it’s just a question, the programme committee can help you shape it into a session that will teach you as much as your audience. And if your session is accepted your place at XPDay 2007 is free.

Andy Moorley has photographed the posters produced by participants at the SPA 2007 cognitive bias workshop. I’ve rotated and cropped them and uploaded them.

There’s been an information vacuum surrounding agile adoption for a long time now. Thankfully, books and other resources are starting to emerge. I’ve just been asked to provide some links on agile adoption and it seems like they might be of some use to the world at large so I’m posting them.

I’ve just read Chris Clarke’s post “How can an application or language be agile?”

I predicted a few years ago “agile” would follow “object-oriented” into the buzzword lexicon, right around when Microsoft started using the word. What happened with OO is that for a while everything was object-oriented. In some ways it was a step forward – lots of people got to hear about it and started trying to do it – but the meaning got so watered down that in the end there are a lot of lessons that most people haven’t really internalized. Hence we get some second-wave attempts to reconnect to the root concepts like Eric Evans’ book “Domain-Driven Design”.