Magnetic Reason

The Agile Radar

keith — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:54:13 +0000

Magnetic Reason are proud to announce The Agile Radar, a new blog syndication website that tries to bring together the latest and greatest posts from as many of the thought leaders in the agile space today.

You can check it out at The Agile Radar

Last Nights Agile Awards 2011

keith — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:24:48 +0000

Unfortunately I did not come away from last nights awards with most valuable agiler player, that honour went to Keith Richards from Keith Richards Consulting. Congrats to Keith and to all the other winners and to Connections for hosting another great event.

Interesting to see the change this year with the dominace of the big agile organisations, which is a shame as their marketing budgets are going to make it increasingly more difficult for individuals to be recognised but that’s the way this whole industry appears to be moving. Not long before the likes of Accenture et al start turning up

New Magnetic Reason Website Goes Live

keith — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:57:16 +0000

Over the past few weeks we have moving out website to WordPress as we believe it gives us much better control over the content we want to display.

Well the time has come for us to open up the website to all our visitors. Its about 80% complete, but we wanted the new look & feel available for the Agile Awards on the 5th October.

Remaining content will be added over the next few days. Enjoy

Top 3 Reasons Designers Object to Agile and How to Overcome Them

keith — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:29:22 +0000

In this post, Jeff shares his experience in addressing the top 3 reasons that designers initially object to agile and ways that we can help introduce alternative thinking to traditional practices.

Read the full article here

Lets Play TDD by James Shore

keith — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 07:37:20 +0000

Sometimes its hard trying to get people to see the benefits of TDD without real world examples so thats why I love the Lets Play TDD series by James shore, this is effectively a suite of videos of James writing software in pure TDD style.

You get to see a real craftsman writing tests, writing code, making it all work in real time, well worth a viewing for any developer

Software Laws

keith — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:41:38 +0000

Over the years I have collected a list of various laws and observations, some are funny, some aren’t, but most if not all still hold true today

You can view a Video version here or get a downloadable PDF version here

Agile In Fife

keith — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:18:10 +0000

To celebrate moving into our new offices, Magnetic Reason, award winning Agile Consultancy based in Fife, will be running free early bird Introduction to Agile Software Delivery sessions.

These will be run from 7:30 – 8:30 in the morning, coffee and cakes will be provided and we’ll be around afterwards to answer questions and provide you with help.

Its open to anyone, senior managers, project managers, developers, testers, analysts, or anyone with an interest in how Agile can be used within their company to help deliver better software.

Email info@magneticreason.com

Why agile gets a bad name ( well one of the reasons )

keith — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:15:08 +0000

Recently I’ve been sitting through presentations by potential partners, all of whom have been told that we are a agile delivery organisation and expect all partners to work within that framework. We are not prescriptive, so don’t mandate hard and fast Scrum or XP, but expect them to demonstrate that they buy into the agile ethos.

Yesterday I had to sit and watch as an organisation presented a suite of slides about how agile they are, clearly showing why to a lot of people the term agile is cloudy and ambiguous. One slide in particular was worrying

They did sprints. What they actually did was split the development up into fixed time boxes, deciding to do the testing of that sprint during the next sprint !!

Testing was done in isolation, developers unit tested their code ( hurrah ), and that was the end of the sprint, they handed it over to testers who then tested it as the developers worked on completely different stories.

They did one integration sprint, at the end when all dev was complete. They basically hooked everything together for the first time at the end.

Nearly 80% of all testing was carried out AFTER development was complete.

Over 1 year, they suffered close to 30 incidents per month, ( i.e bugs ) !!! Enough said on that one

Unfortunately when large organisations are putting forward their waterfall way of working as agile then agile will continue to get tarnished with this sort of work, irrespective of the the success or failure of the project.

This sets up FUD ( Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt ) around agile, people new to it, fail to get some of the key principles of collaboration and early release of value because they see large respected organisations telling them that if they continue to do waterfall, but split the development up into timeboxes then they are agile.

OSX Virutalisation …. Finally

keith — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:00:36 +0000

For those of you/us that are involved in automated testing, the use of virtualisation software like VMWare has been a blessing. With VMWare installed on a Mac Pro tower 8 processors and 32GB of Ram I can run multiple instances of different version of Windows ( XP, Vista, 7 etc ) and Linux ( Fedora, Ubuntu, SESU etc ) and have them configured with different browser combinations ( Firefox 3, 4 or 5, IE 6, 7, 8 and 9 etc ) because so Os’s don’t like different instances of browsers installed at the same time. This has all been great apart from OSX, which has never ( legally ) liked running under VMWare.

This all changes with the release of OSX Snow Leopard on Wednesday with the important addition of the ability to virtualise 2 additional instances of OSX on the server. Read about it here

The real reason most code is not open source

keith — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 06:59:53 +0000

Excellent article on The Register this morning about why most developed software is not open source.

Basically its too hard for many IT organisations to support the code in its early stages.

As an developer and benevolent dictator of my own award winning open source project, Fitnium, I can understand the main issues here.

When you first release open source, you are the only developer and it takes time and effort to grow the community and get people involved. All of it done entirely free because you personally feel something you developed can make a difference to other people.