Some Thoughts on Software Development
A few years ago, After observing some notable failures, I just had to write about How to Crash and Burn your Java project.
Lately I've seen some more failures brewing, so in the same vein I offer What to do when the Estimate is Wrong.
More of my thoughts are in my books Software Craftsmanship and Questioning Extreme Programming. There are also many papers and articles that I have written been written over the years, and some of these topics have been elaborated into talks.
Services Offered
As well as providing OO Mentoring , I offer a complete range of training courses, including Alistair Cockburn's Writing Effective Use Cases course.
Other services offered include Quality Assurance, Software Process Improvement, Object Transitioning Services and Distributed Object Systems Design & Development
Recently I've been doing a lot of work with Ruby to script applications and do data mining against existing databases. Given the way that Ruby has matured over the past few years it is now a very effective means for implementing quite complex functionality in reasonable time. Rails has also proven to be an interesting environment to develop in, especially when using TextMate.
About Software Craftsmanship Inc.
Biography and contact information for Pete McBreen
Software Craftsmanship
The concept of software craftsmanship has been around for a long time, the book is my interpretation of those ideas and the challenges that face software developers and the users of software. The book was well received and it won a Productivity Award at the 12th annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards in 2002. Software Crafstmanship has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
Interestingly the craftsmanship idea is widespread within the Agile Software Development community, but I can claim no credit for that, I was merely documenting a growing trend. Overall there has been a very positive shift in software development in the past few years, users are getting better software and the working environment for software developers is improving.
Although I am known for Questioning XP, it does appear that XP is maturing into an approach that has wide applicability, and the ideas from XP are having a wide impact upon the way that software is being developed. The most notable effect of XP has been the way that the quality assurance and testing communities have had to respond to much higher quality software. If only all our problems were those of success.
News, views and opinions
Sept 2009 Not many updates here, most live content is at http://www.improvingwetware.com/ where I'm exploring some ideas about Craftsmanship.
May 2006 I am still looking for interesting software development stories, anecdotes and heuristics for inclusion in my next book project. I am most interested in the people side of software development, yes, technology matters, but the skills and experience of the people matters more. Comments, ideas and suggestions to the usual address.
Links
Use Cases and related topics : My Use Case articles and selected links to the rest of the web.
Ruby For The Nuby
A partial, early draft of An Introduction to Software Craftsmanship: Ruby for The Nuby edition is available. Many thanks for the feedback that has been received to date.