Thursday, March 29, 2007 - Posts

It's called "Iterative" for a reason...

Iterative development has many strengths and a few weaknesses. But one thing is not in dispute: iterative means you make more than one pass through the code.

The major weakness of iterative development is its unpredictability. It's definitely time and material project work. This can be very frustrating to the folks trying to budget the project.

One strength of iterative development is the quality of the code and final product. Combined with test-driven development practices like Test-First Development, iterative development completes a project and leaves a suite of regression tests in place. This increases the development cycle for version 1.0, but pays for itself many times over with each subsequent iteration.

I was asked for an estimated delivery time once by a project manager. I'd been given time to do a thorough analysis (sometimes I miss those days) and had an answer: "6 months."

"Unacceptable, you have three months." the PM responded.

Undaunted I replied "Ok. You can have the application in six months, or you can have a three-month project - three months late."

They didn't like either option so they moved me off the project and hired new people. Last I heard, they're still working on it...

:{> Andy

Technorati Tags:

Cool Scripting Tutorials

is a cool site to learn scripting - from the Microsoft Scripting Guys!

Definitely worth a click for us old-timers too. I learned something, and I've been writing code since the days we had to carve our own chips out of wood.

:{> Andy

Technorati Tags:

When to Test

All software is tested. Some of it is tested before it's deployed, some immediately thereafter.

;)

It's always good to test before deployment. It's even better to test deployment itself.

I'm honored to be part of a really cool team of Test Engineers / Authors writing (Wrox). I'm not sure about similar books in the marketplace (one bad thing about writing is it consumes all my reading time!). This book is written for individuals and teams developing software using Visual Studio Team System. And it will help you understand when and why to test (before deploying, even!).

I know this is a great book - I've been reading the chapters as they're turned in! The other three authors are testing gurus. Not only are these guys very good Test Engineers, they're also cool people. It's been an honor to work with Tom, Dominic, and Mike.

This has been a fun writing project!

:{> Andy

Technorati Tags: