Linda Rising

The Scrum software development process for small teams

In todays software development environment, requirements often change during the product development life-cycle to meet shifting business demands, creating endless headaches for development teams. We discuss our experience in implementing the Scrum software development process to address these concerns.

Problems with determining package cohesion and coupling

The cohesion and coupling guidelines described by Yourdon, Constantine and Myers have proved useful aids for the design of modular programs. They have also provided direction for the evaluation of existing modules, pointing to those candidates for restructuring during perfective maintenance. For languages like Ada, where support for a higher‐level of abstraction is provided in the form of a package, subprogram heuristics are inadequate. This paper examines existing guidelines and taxonomies for the Ada package and proposes extensions to these schemes. These package‐level schemes are applied in a case study of an existing Ada program.

Non-software examples of software design patterns

Software design patterns have roots in the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander, and in the object movement. According to Alexander, patterns repeat themselves, since they are a generic solution to a given system of forces. The object movement looks to the real world for insights into modeling software relationships. With these dual roots, it seems reasonable that software design patterns should be repeated in real world objects. This paper presents a real world, non software instance of each design pattern from the book, Design Patterns Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software [13]. The paper also discusses the implications of non-software examples on the communicative power of a pattern language, and on design pattern training.

Why Can't We All Play Nice?

This article is based on the authors research in stereotyping and collaboration—the two opposing forces that work to prevent and support the building of great teams. It was only late in her long career that she realized how important the “people” side is. Tools, programming languages, environments, and all the other technical stuff are important, but that “softer” side can be really, really hard.

The Benefit of Patterns

This article talks about the role of design patterns in the software development. It discusses about the new and interesting object-oriented designs, vision patterns and mediator design pattern. The real power of patterns is not to hand us exotic solutions, but to give us a way to remember the simple, ordinary, basic solutions that we know but forget.

Telling Our Stories

An introduction to a new series of articles, inviting readers to share stories, both project and life experiences, and lessons learned.

A fishbowl with piranhas: coalescence, convergence or divergence?

Agile software development practices including XP and Scrum have risen to prominence within the software engineering community over the past ten years. Are agile software development practices converging? Are some practices becoming more integrated and/or more widely adopted than others? In the early 90s there was a convergence of object-oriented design methodologies - is a similar pattern being repeated within the agile software development community? Several years ago conferences featured debates on the number of practices inherent to XP - or for that matter what constituted XP. Is the Agile community on the verge of converging to standardization or do individual practices retain their individually and evangelists/disciples? A somewhat related question is: Can an agile practice be applied out of the box or is some assembly required? What does it take to get agility going in an organization? Does it work as advertised? What practices work and play well with others? Hear the experiences of panelists in their attempts to actually make agile work in the real world. From Crystal, DSDM, FDD, LEAN, Scrum, to XP (and others) - participants will to share their perspectives and experiences. Be warned - this fishbowl will be stocked with piranhas.

Hacker or hero? - extreme programming today (panel session)

Extreme programming is the latest rage, everyone is talking extreme, but who is doing it? XP is in the words of one proponent, is a “lightweight, efficient, low-risk, predictable, scientific, and fun way to develop software”. XP bundles much conventional software engineering wisdom into a practice with a high degree of appeal as a cool technology. Questions for inquiring minds include: Will XP deliver? Will XP scale? How will products based on software developed by XP practices age? What are the elements of XP that can be effectively adopted by organizations outside the XP envelop, e.g. large teams, real-time systems, etc. Is XP the next “silver bullet”?

Object-oriented success stories: "learning from our failures"

Beneath the buzz around methodologies, languages and technologies, the last seventeen years at OOPSLA have seen countless object-oriented success and failure stories, large and small. Last year at OOPSLA there was great enthusiasm over the telling of object-oriented success stories. However, we believe that one often learns more from failures than successes. This fishbowl will provide OOPSLA attendees to bear witness to these failure stories, and tell these tales at last.

What Programmers Should Know

An introduction to a new series of articles, inviting readers to share stories, both project and life experiences, and lessons learned.