Category: Development

All development

Lean and Agile in Software Development

As this post is quite long, you can get it in PDF here.

Some time ago, at the company where I am currently working, I suggested that we could create some posters about Lean and Agile so that people would keep it in the back of their heads on their day to day work. I also made myself available to explain, to the IT department, what Lean and Agile are all about, but because of lack of time, that explanation ended up never happening.

Lately, I’ve found that there are some people around me that have the desire and need to know a bit more about Lean and Agile, about what they stand for, how their practices should impact our day to day work, and what’s there to gain from it. So I decided to write this post in an attempt to cover that.

I’ve talked about Lean and Agile before, in a post titled What is Lean and Agile about Software Architecture but it had a very restricted spectrum. In this post, however, I want to take it a bit further.

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Architecture 1st design step: Partitioning

There are many ways of partitioning an application. Usually, what we do is actually classify the code according to some criteria and organise the code following that criteria.

This chapter of the book explores four criteria:

  • Functionality vs. Domain;
  • Conway’s Law;
  • Geographic constraints;
  • Cultural concerns.

All in all, the idea is that we partition our codebase with long-term local autonomy in mind, according to history, standards and conventions, experience and common sense (Coplien 2010, p.91).

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What is Lean and Agile about Software Architecture

Good Software Architecture embodies several Lean and Agile principles, always with the same goal of long-term productivity and lightweight feature development.

Delaying structural decisions will outcome in undisciplined structure, which in turn outcomes in waste. Therefore we must think of Software Architecture as an investment that we need to make now to get medium and long term gain.

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Stakeholder engagement: Trimming wasted time

In my previous posts, I briefly described the stakeholders. However, they are not Lean nor Agile themselves. What is really important, for Lean and Agile, is how they work together: Everybody, all together, from early on. Continue reading “Stakeholder engagement: Trimming wasted time” →

DDD Europe 2017: The 3 talks I most enjoyed

Last week I attended the DDD Europe conference. This was the 2nd edition, and it was held in Amsterdam, where I live. The company where I work, Werkspot, sponsored my ticket, so what else could I wish for?!

Well, actually I could wish for a good conference, and it was! Very experienced developers were speaking there: Vaughn Vernon, Udy Dahan, Nick Tune, Greg Young, Alberto Brandolini, Paul Raynes, the inevitable Eric Evans, and even Melvin Conway which is probably around 80 years old by now!!

I attended twelve talks and this post is about the three talks I found more interesting.

Some of the talks from 2016 are available on their YouTube channel, I suppose at some point they will make some of 2017 available as well.

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Microservices architecture: What the gurus say about it

About a year ago I was very interested in learning as much as possible about the subject and gathered as much information as I could about it. I watched several conference talks and I read several articles from very knowledgeable and experienced people, like Martin Fowler, Fred George, Adrian Cockcroft, or Chris Richardson, in order to learn as much as possible about microservices, and this post is the result of that.

This post talks about:

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Stakeholder engagement: The end-users

There are five major stakeholder areas :

  • End-users
  • Business
  • Customers
  • Domain experts
  • Developers

Both Agile and Lean tell us to break the traditional approach of contacting the stakeholders at a specific moment of the project development, and instead keep a permanent contact with them throughout the project development.

Continue reading “Stakeholder engagement: The end-users” →