Chapter 7
One of the main
reasons to implement an Agile environment I believe is that you are
constantly reviewing and re-tooling the process to make it work in an
efficient manner. I like how he opens with something similar to this
and says something to the effect of not being tied down to a heap of
documents and diagrams that were written a century ago. Technologies
change fast today so what may have been good yesterday may not be
good today, literally. In the author’s words Agile development
provides a “quick, short feedback loop”. I understand, but I
don’t understand why all companies don’t use extreme programming
practices. He says that in one company they noticed a 1/3 reduction
in production bugs. That is amazing and saves the company a lot of
cash and it’s amazing that companies seem to value it so little as
far as the book says anyway. I like his stance on how to convince a
manager to use the practices by promoting the value of the
methodology instead of the practice of it. That is good advice.
Another thing that I was surprised by was the efficiency of automated
testing, I mean I know that is a time saver and all that, but I
didn’t realize the scale of its goodness. It does make sense though
because as he says, “as the system grows so do the number of
tests.”. Writing them before hand is a time saver and also gives
you something to code to. I am not going to go into the rest of the
chapter because it is a repeat of the Clean Coder. Test Driven
Development, Refactoring, Pair Programming, Refactoring, Continuous
integration, yada, yada, yada. I find that the book has its good
points, but it is a lot of Clean Coder and I think that either one or
the other should be read, but certainly not both in my opinion.
Chapter 8
This chapter brought
back memories of me and my good ole commodore 64 chopping away at te
keys in basic. I only wish I had stuck with it back then, but I am
glad that I got back to my roots and got back into it again. I think
out of all of the chapters I relate to this one the most, but on a
personal level. I like the Yogi Berra quote, “ You’ve got to be
careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might
not get there.” I thought I was doing what I loved at my last job
until I got hurt that is. Then I was in a whole new situation and I
didn’t like it. I am finally at the point that I know what I want
to do and am happy with the decision, but it took a while to get
here. I have been and am using a lot of his tactics. Expanding
technical knowledge, attending user groups, and networking to name a
few and they have been fantastic to me. Like he says a career is an
investment. I am glad I am a bit older and have gained a lot of
wisdom along the way so the process of changing careers has been ok,
scary in a way but ok. I am doing what I love and can’t wait to put
it into practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment