Author Archives: Rebecca

How far should you look ahead?

I’m a consultant. So an easy answer would be, “It depends.” My real answer is more nuanced: only look ahead far enough to see some significant issue and a plausible way to resolve it. If you want to get better, … Continue reading

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Agile Architecture Myth #5: Never Look Ahead

Stop it! Stop anticipating! Get coding. Get that next user story working. Don’t. Ever. Anticipate. This seems to be a common agile mantra these days. Since we allegedly aren’t good at anticipating how code will evolve, well frack it, let’s … Continue reading

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What is Pragmatic Testing All About?

-Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Joe Yoder We’re excited to be offering a new course, Pragmatic Test-Driven Development, with a practical bent to testing. Test-driven development (TDD) traditionally means writing unit and acceptance tests along with production code. Some agile thought leaders … Continue reading

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An Architect’s Dilemna: Should I Rework or Exploit Legacy Architecture?

I recently spoke with an architect has been tuning up a legacy system that is built out of a patchwork quilt of technologies. As a consequence of its age and lack of common design approaches, the system is difficult to … Continue reading

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Agile Architecture Myths #4 Because you are agile you can change your system fast!

Agile designers embrace change. But that doesn’t mean change is always easy. Some things are harder to change than others. So it is good to know how to explain this to impatient product stakeholders, program managers, or product owners when … Continue reading

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Re-thinking Thinking and Planning

In the tutorial, Hooray We’re Agile Testers! What’s Next?, Janet Gregory apologized a couple of times for saying upfront thinking or planning. I know Janet wanted to let the audience know that she isn’t a fan of massive test plans … Continue reading

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Who Defines (or Redefines) Landing Zone Criteria?

Who should be in on discussions that set landing zone criteria? Because most landing zone have architectural implications, someone knowledgeable about the system architecture, in addition to the product owner and other key stakeholders should have a lot to say … Continue reading

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Landing Zone Targets: Precision, Specificity, and Wiggle Room

A landing zone is a set of criteria used to monitor and characterize the “releasability” of a product. Landing zones allow you to take product features and system qualities and trade them off against each other to determine what an … Continue reading

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Agile Landing Zones

In my last post I introduced the idea of landing zones, a set of criteria used to monitor and characterize the “releasability” of a product. A landing zone contains system attributes that must be achieved to declare “success”, along with … Continue reading

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Introducing Landing Zones

On an aircraft carrier, the landing zone describes a small section of deck that a pilot must touch down in to land the plane safely. By analogy, a landing zone for a product describes a range of measurable attributes that … Continue reading

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