I've run in to some Agility questions recently. Questions that indicate that some people just don't like the Inversion of Control aspect of Agile methods.

We used to call IoC "Emergent Behavior". The system isn't designed from top-down to fill specific use cases. Instead, the system is designed so that …

One of the Agile practices is Continuous Integration.

Fowler suggests that everyone commits every day. In Elssamadisy's book includes specific advice on why a daily check-in helps.

Some folks call this the "Don't Break the Build" practice.

But what does that mean for Python where there is no build? And …

We have a design, we have code and we have tests that all pass.

Tuesday, we got some new input data that just wouldn't work.

What -- if anything -- went wrong?

Agile is as Agile Does

We're following an Agile approach for several reasons.

1. I'm too lazy to draw up an …

Here's a great quote from a reader regarding Big Plan for Change : "[the advice] doesn't account for project tracking requirements of the organization. Budgeting. Metrics. Hiring. Documenting. Transitioning to new staff."

Good point. Let's look at these in a little bit of depth. We'll cover the three management practices first …

Here's a great summary of Agile techniques. It's in ComputerWorld's Development section, in an article by Heather Havenstein: "Five Web 2.0 app dev lessons for enterprise IT ". I think the article is mis-titled, since it's basically "Agile for Big IT."

Some of the five techniques are motherhood and apple-pie …

TC's full quote was "We consume a significant portion of the overall contract generating a functional specification whose sole use is to serve as the outline for the acceptance test. Those who choose to argue this point might like to explain the recurring customer comment 'You did an excellent job …

TC Writes "With 30 years in the biz, I’ve experienced all the pains associated with a rigid linear approach (functional spec -> design doc -> code -> integrate -> acceptance test, always being sure to maintain a current version of the traceability matrix). An iterative approach is inherently more appealing, but I’m …

Centuries ago -- it seems -- Jim Coplien facilitated a session for us at ChiliPLoP . Eventually, I figured out that patterns are a solution to a problem in a context which resolves various alternative forces, and has some understood consequences. Context - Problem - Forces - Solution - Consequences.

In this month's CACM, the article on …

In Object Modeling , I repeated a procedure for object identification that comes from the classic Object-Oriented Modeling and Design (Rumbaugh, et. al.)

Objects are characterized by their state change. Therefore, to distinguish among classes of objects, we need to determine if two objects have the same states and state transitions …

Without mentioning Armour's The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software (which includes the Five Orders of Ignorance, quoted by Paul Freedman in "Uncovering Ignorance in Software Development "), Purdy has hit the nail on the head regarding gestation of architectures.

Is Gestation overhead …