Articles

When we build software in an Agile process correctly, we discover that it is actually more efficient and quicker to do high-quality work than in a traditional Waterfall process. This is because a traditional Waterfall process devotes very little time to actually building software, which is where the value is to the customer.  We spend […]

I think a lot of companies believe that Agile software development is merely a process and that somehow software developers know how to use. But in my experience that is simply not true.  The way we build software is different in an iterative process than the way be built software in a traditional Waterfall process.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that because they are using Agile or Scrum that they don’t need to do design or write documentation—or even think. Nothing is further from the truth!  I wrote a post about this in 2011. I called it “The Scrum Excuse” at https://tobeagile.com/2011/06/28/the-scrum-excuse/.  Agile software development was created by

If ever there was a convoluted, misunderstood term in software development, it’s the word “quality.” To some people, quality in software is software that does the right thing. Others say it’s software that’s free of defects. Still others say quality software is software that runs fast. All these things are good but they’re not necessarily

The actor-producer Paul Reiser once said that producing is about figuring out what needs to be done and doing it. I think this also makes a good job description for software developers. Programmers are producers. We create something out of nothing at all, out of pure thought. Our skills are not just in writing code.

I often ask attendees of my classes what makes a good design or what makes a design not good. We can all recognize some aspect of a design or implementation in software as being good or not but it can be difficult to talk about why. When I ask software developers how they describe what

ChatGPT is a large-language model, a particular kind of AI program. Large-language models (LLMs) are not intelligent; they don’t learn and grow based on user interactions but learn through training.  Large language models are not conscious, nor will they become conscious, so we don’t have ethical or moral concerns, but others are working on AI

Legacy code is Software the Developers don’t wanna touch. It’s the code that industry uses to run the world and it is fit for its current purpose but developers find it hard to extend and that’s because legacy software is often written in a way that doesn’t support future changes, not because it can’t but

I’m an early adopter. I was a wiz with Alta Vista  (a predecessor to Google) back in the day. Actually, a full decade before that I was using one of the first networks that aggregated scientific papers called Dialog Information Services. It costs something like $100 an hour to connect and 25 cents per citation.

Put yourself in virtual shoes for a moment and see from Chat’s perspective. We often ask questions without providing any additional context and expect our AI to respond as though it could read our minds. To get good answers we have to provide background so I have conversations with Chat, invite their suggestions, and go