Behavior-driven development (BDD) and keywords are both widely used techniques to facilitate automated testing. The approaches are similar in that tests can be written in a business-readable, ...

Everybody knows that the later you find defects, the more expensive they are to fix. Everybody knows that, right? Well, back in 1976, a software engineer named Barry Boehm said defects are more ...

Team norms—sometimes known as ground rules—revolve around how members of a team will interact, communicate, and conduct themselves as team members. Norms express intentions; they help team members ...

Things go wrong, and when they do, it can be helpful to understand how it happened and, sometimes, who is responsible for mistakes that happened. However, all too often organizations (and the managers ...

If you deal with legacy code you’ve likely found yourself struggling to debug and fix a mysterious, intermittent problem. Along the way you may have discovered some code that didn’t quite make sense.

Most of the advice on meetings concerns how to run them. But what about when you’re attending the meeting rather than running it, and the meeting is endless or boring? Certainly, it can help to stay ...

It seems to defy all logic, but the best programmers have two usually undesirable traits: They’re lazy and dumb. That’s the point of a classic post by web developer and blogger Philipp Lenssen that I ...

One of the most intriguing aspects of software architecture is trying to bring structure to areas that can’t be structured easily. Whenever an architect designs a system, service, or feature, they are ...

This is the age of speed dating, speed networking, speed yoga, and, yes, even speed meditation. It’s a time of rush-rush-rush in the attempt to do more, sooner, faster. But there doesn’t seem to be a ...

A common problem for Scrum teams is having a good understanding of what work is complete by the end of the sprint. Testing, especially automated integration testing, is a challenge, so teams often end ...

A set of vertices with each vertex having zero or more labels and zero or more properties/attributes. A set of edges with each edge being directed from one vertex to another vertex. Each edge has zero ...

Occasionally, I hear someone maintain that you can’t have too much communication. I disagree. In matters of communication, more is not necessarily better. Sure, too little communication can result in ...