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Earning vs. Learning

It's the age-old quandry: how do we learn new skills and improve as software developers when we're under pressure to focus almost exclusively on delivering software now?

As a trainer and coach, it's the number one biggest barrier to getting results. The management want their teams to be more productive, and they want the software they produce to be of better quality. But the developers who tend to be most productive and who produce the best quality code tend to be the ones who have dedicated the most of their time to learning and experimenting.

Typemock Isolator V4.2 Released

February 26, 2008 – Typemock Ltd, the world leading unit testing framework provider, announced today the new release of Typemock Isolator, the ultimate solution to enable shorter development cycles, higher quality of production code, better tested and more stable software components.

New Survey Confirms Increased Agile Adoption

A recent Methods & Tools poll researched the agile software development practices adoption rate in organizations. The question asked was "At what stage is the agile approach (XP, Scrum, TDD, ...) adoption at your location?" A similar poll was already performed in 2005. Its results are between brackets.

Not aware: 13% (26%)
Not using: 13% (16%)
Investigating: 14% (14%)

New tool added - WebDriver

A developer focused tool for automated testing of webapps: WebDriver has a simple API designed to be easy to work with and can drive both real browsers, for testing javascript heavy applications, and a pure "in memory" solution for faster testing of simpler applications.

Post Agilism - an apology to Jonathan Kohl

About a year or so ago I posted a Mr Angry challenge to a blog post by Jonathan Kohl. It was a grumpy complaint about a post of his description of the 'post-agilist' er, situation. A year ago, I was interested in what was happening but was no better informed at the blogs that talked of post-agilism. The grumpy post didn't achieve much except a bit of criticism of myself (but not much really ... ner ner).

Production vs. Attendance on Teams

Jeffrey Phillips wrote a nice post on Accountable for production not attendance. In it he argues that most knowledge workers should be treated like virtual workers – they should be held accountable for their production, not their attendance. The implication is that the results of the work is far more important than when or where they work. This is something I have given a great deal of thought to and agree with in principle. However, the focus here is on the individual. What if the individual works on a team?