In the next video, I’m introducing the idea that a software development team is a knowledge refinery. It takes crude knowledge in the form of vague needs and wants, and refines it through successive processes into precise, executable knowledge – otherwise known as computer code. This video continues on the ideas presented in the previous... Read more
I recently started writing my fourth book, “Mastering Software Engineering in C++”. This led me into asking a fundamental question: what is really software engineering? You may find the answer surprising. Here’s the video: If you have any questions on comments, please don’t hesitate to post them below.
In this article, I will present a method that I’ve tried in a few codebases in compiled languages for safely and quickly refactoring untested code. First, we will discuss the main problem we are trying to solve, quickly introduce the techniques coined by Michael Feathers, then discuss some shortcomings of the existing techniques, and finally... Read more
This is a guest post by Andrey Adamovich The first time, I gave a talk titled “Enterprise flight into DevOps space”, was in late 2014 at DevConFu conference. After that, I have delivered the presentation several times during 2015 at various conferences in Europe. For some time, I considered that a “closed topic” and did not... Read more
It’s impossible to ignore the topic of microservices today. We hear about them from social media, conferences, specialized websites, books, framework vendors, communities, colleagues. It seems like they’re the only way to go. But are they? To answer this question, we first need to explore why are microservices so useful, what are their downsides and... Read more
Evolutionary Design is the practice of growing a system in a natural way, by adding the minimum amount of code to satisfy the business needs in an iterative and incremental approach. When done right, the code structure changes continuously to optimize for change, thus allowing a constant speed of development for longer periods of time. In... Read more
Let’s be honest, we do not treat frontend code the same way we treat backend code. And it shows. We talk about applying rules of clean code, about keeping it simple, about writing unit tests. Yet, when it comes to writing frontend code, we skip all those rules that we usually self impose. We convinced... Read more
We’ve all have been there: trying to become more productive and improve the way we work. If you are looking for a way to limit the “work in progress” answers received from your colleagues and achieve better results, here is a tool you can experiment with: the Kanban board. What is the Kanban board A kanban... Read more
Is technical leadership important? Even in a modern, agile / lean / software craftsmanship company? My experience says it is not only important but the key to the improved performance of developers. Whether we’re talking about a team technical lead, a software architect, a CTO, or an informal leader, I often see the need to understand their... Read more
This article has first appeared in Today Software Magazine. Why Spock? When we first started working on our project at work, we searched for an easy-to-use tool that would help us write readable and concise tests. We chose Spock, because in combination with Groovy it provided exactly what we needed: readable BDD-style tests that we... Read more
Grzegorz (Greg) Albrecht, speaker at Product Leaders 2017, got interviewed by our colleague, Steliana Moraru, Event Manager. Read on to discover his professional experience, lessons learned and challenges met along the way. Steliana: You have a professional background that spans from product manager to startup founder to venture partner. Share with us a... Read more
One way of learning new things about your coding style and about yourself is by doing a daily code kata. It can be like a simulation of a year-long software development project, with all the ups and downs happening in a much shorter time scale (a few iterations). More on that below. I encourage you... Read more
The complete interview can be found on InfoQ. Adrian Bolboacă, Organizational and Technical Coach and Trainer at Mozaic Works, got interviewed by Ben Linders, InfoQ, about different types of tests, writing sufficient and good acceptance tests, criteria to decide to automate a test, and how to apply test automation to create executable specifications. Testing techniques... Read more
This is a guest post by Ralph Roosmalen Scrum versus Waterfall. Management 1.0 versus Management 3.0. Automated Testing versus Manual Testing. Estimation versus No Estimations. SAFe versus LeSS. So many different opinions on all kind of topics and it seems like people always want you to choose between left or right, up or down etc. When... Read more
Richard Omollo, UX Designer Booking.com and speaker at Product Leaders 2017, just got interviewed by our colleague, Monica Obogeanu, product manager at Mozaic Labs. Read on to discover his professional experience, lessons learned and challenges along the way. Monica Obogeanu: Snooping through your LinkedIn profile, I noticed you have a wide & varied experience. Please tell... Read more
The 5th edition of I T.A.K.E Unconference, the only technology agnostic event in Central and Eastern Europe, is taking place in Bucharest, Romania, 11-12 May. With a line-up of more than 30 international speakers, 6 keynotes, 6 parallel tracks, a technical Open Space and many opportunities for coding, the event brings together top-notch software crafters who lead the change in... Read more
As practitioners and trainers using Kanban, we insist on a few changes in perspective that it requires in order to be effective. One of them is capacity planning. Kanban, like Scrum, assumes that the capacity of the team 1 is fixed in the short term. This leads to the question: how can we use the current... Read more
This is a guest post by Thomas Sundberg What makes one specification a bad specification and another specification a good specification? What is the fundamental difference between two specifications? Software is special One important difference between physical things and programs is that physical things are complicated to test. Physical things usually need special tools to... Read more
One of the first techniques I learned as a beginner Product Owner was user story mapping. I immediately found it was easy to understand and apply. What took a while longer was appreciating its true power – identifying all the situations where it can be applied. In the eventriX team, we use it to keep... Read more
One of the dangers of writing user stories is that they can get pretty big if there’s no one on the team to point it out. The scope of a user story becomes broader than it should be. In the following article, I’m going to walk you through the reasons why you should aim for... Read more
