Pragmatic Agilist

I have been following up on my recent discovery of " Feature Injection " by trying to track down some more information about Behavior Driven Development, or "BDD," which is the software development technique into which feature injection fits.  Handily, someone really good at BDD has put what seems to be a lot of really high quality information into the wikipedia entry , so I urge you to go check that out immediately, before someone less-good changes it! But in the mean time, I've been talking with colleagues about the practicalities of BDD, and I'm just enchanted by the helpful structure BDD provides for describing what's different about agile business analysis from its handy bête noire and sparring partner, "Big Upfront Design." So, compare and contrast a "requirement" written in detail well before software development begins (the "BUFD" requirement) to the one done "just in time," expressed for perpetuity in ...

I spent the weekend with most of my North American ThoughtWorks colleagues at an event called the "North American Away Day."  It was a pretty overwhelming experience, overall, but here were some highlights for me: Filming a ThoughtWorks "It Gets Better" video with LGBT friends and allies in a beautiful gully outside the St. Charles, Illinois, venue.  Rajiv Mathew kindly shot the video--he is amazing. (photo courtesy of Chris Stevenson). Meeting Christopher Atkins again, and finding out about his blog .  Check out this beautiful Tufte-quality graph depicting the value of agile methods.  Hearing Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! speak--she is the most amazing speaker I have ever experienced.  If you're sitting around feeling depressed and worried that we don't have any independent press any more, she's way ahead of you, and thank God for that. Finding out about OpenMRS , an organization creating a software platform to be used to track medical records (...