Steve Trefethen's Weblog

Generating MSDN style documentation using Sandcastle

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:34:18 GMT

To the right is a screenshot of MSDN style documentation created using Microsoft’s SandCastle and SandCastle Help File Builder (SHFB) which is generated as part of a Continuous Integration build running under CruiseControl.NET shown here hosted within a page on a ScrewTurn wiki at a client’s site.

The documentation was created for the EDI Invoicing system I developed. Originally, I’d simply followed the Thoughtworks style for documenting Tasks and Source Control providers but that proved rather time consuming and required a fair amount of hand editing. Using this mechanism the documentation on the wiki is always up-to-date and I don’t have to worry about maintaining lots of static content.

SandCastle Help File Builder to the Rescue

Rather than using SandCastle, Microsoft’s oh-so-slowly-developing documentation tool for managed code, Eric Woodruff has created SHFB which gives SandCastle the user experience you’d expect from Microsoft itself. (btw, if you’re a Borland fan be sure to check out Eric’s Turbo Vision page for a trip down memory lane)

SHFB allows you to create a project, select the desired assemblies, and generated web based MSDN style documentation easily. In fact, SHFB allows you to select from three different web site styles. Be sure to read the Links to Resources section as there are a number of additional tools required. Of course, the same thing is possible with SandCastle itself and if you’re up for it check out this post for details.

Generating API Doc Under Continuous Integration

Since I didn’t want to have to manually regenerate the documentation I setup a CruiseControl.NET task to handle creating the documentation web site which also uses SHFB and looks like this:


          
            
            <
            exec 
            executable
            ="C:\Program
Files\EWSoftware\SHFB\SandcastleBuilderConsole.exe"
            >
            
            
            <
            baseDirectory
            >
            c:\work\utilities\edi\help
            </
            baseDirectory
            >
            
            
            <
            buildArgs
            >
            vtalk.shfb
            </
            buildArgs
            >
            
            
            <
            buildTimeoutSeconds
            >
            2400
            </
            buildTimeoutSeconds
            >
            
            
            </
            exec
            >

Adding this as a task ensures that the documentation is never out of date with the one minor downside being that the documentation isn’t available during the build but that’s really minor.

Conclusion

If you’ve been holding off using SandCastle or have been looking for tools to make it easier be sure to give SHFB a try as it worked like a charm for me.

What’s your experience with SandCastle been like? Have you tried it?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Borland completes the sale of CodeGear

Steve Trefethen — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:14:06 GMT

The shoe finally dropped. My former employer Borland finally completed the sale of their CodeGear division. The sale is for $23M to Embarcadero Technologies of San Francisco a database tools company. After 16 years looks like I’ll finally be removing BORL from my watch list. It’s pretty quiet on the CodeGear Blogs on the subject and I have yet to hear from anyone on the inside. I wish them great success going forward!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Is it cool when top bloggers have to explain why it's cool?

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 05 May 2008 06:43:52 GMT

If you’ve taken a peek at Microsoft Live Mesh would you leave a comment here and tell me what the big deal is? And what the hell is Steve Gilmor talking about? Seriously, read that article if you can get through it. I get the feeling that top bloggers like Gilmore and Scoble use all this social networking buzz like a proverbial hacky sack devised to simply keep a conversation afloat. Scoble even goes so far as say

Microsoft’s fans are delivered to the promised land.
- Robert Scoble (link)

Where exactly is this promised land? Seriously, that’s out of touch given Mesh’s beta status, numerous missing features and a nebulous definition. Heck, I’m an MS fan and I just don’t get it. I’ve yet to come across a clear description of what Mesh really is or will be? My initial experience completely sucked. The other night I sat down for dinner with Barry Kelly and Adam Markowitz (Adam, you’ve been linked to so get that blog up!) and neither had a good understanding of Mesh and these are bright guys!

I’m actually glad or perhaps even relieved it confounds Joel as well. For now, I’ll take that as a good sign.

Anyway, .NET started out pretty nebulous and poorly defined but the end result has proven extremely satisfying so there is hope. I wonder if Microsoft felt compelled to release something in these days of exploding social networks simply to remain relevant and in the conversation which, in this case, somehow seems to have worked. IMO it seems Mesh was released so customers could try to help Microsoft to figure out exactly what to do with this technology as a number of pieces seems like a rehash of existing services.

Now, had Microsoft announced a Windows based, Amazon-like, elastic compute cloud that would have been really interesting.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Facebook wants to know what client library you use

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:48:55 GMT

If you’ve downloaded either the Facebook Developer Toolkit or Facebook.NET Starter Kits I recommend voting in Facebook’s poll regarding which client library you use. It seems to me there’s no good reason Facebook shouldn’t provide an ASP.NET support on par with PHP though I’m biased. Here is the blog post about the poll.

Heck, even if you haven’t downloaded my starter kits but you do ASP.NET development be sure to vote!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Windows Live Mesh - Administrators not allowed?

Steve Trefethen — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:06:17 GMT

So this is a new twist...

I decided to take a peek at Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mesh and upon attempting to install the client for Devices got this error message:

Now, I don’t know about you but I’d be hard pressed to think of someone I know running Vista who hasn’t disabled UAC. Anyway, I switch my account to Power User and install the client which gives me this message hovering over my tray:

Pressing forward I click on the Mesh icon in my tray and see this:

Now, I recognize the little colorful shield next to Configure Live Mesh Report Desktop means it requires elevated privileges. I click the link and get the above error window again. So, I exit live Mesh, click on the Start menu, type "mesh" then right click to "Run as Administrator":

I return to the above Live Mesh window and click the "Configure Live Mesh Remote Desktop" link and:

So much for living on the edge now, back to work!

Anyone else have better luck?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

If you're a Clive Cussler fan you'll enjoy this...

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:50:53 GMT

I’m a big Clive Clusser fan and I stumbled into this article by Joshua Davis in Wired through Barry Kelly's shared Google Reader items. It’s been sitting in a tab in my browser for days now and I’ve read it a few times and I keep getting drawn back to it sort of like I did with Into Thin Air yet another good real life story.

Thanks Barry!

Do you have a link blog or share links via Reader?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

URL rewriting in ASP.NET and web.config settings

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:27:22 GMT

The other day I blogged about potentially switching to blogengine.net but one of the major issues is ensuring the URL’s I have in dasBlog either continue to work or redirect accordingly. To that end, I started investigating URL rewriters for ASP.NET and found this post of ScottGu’s very helpful. He mentioned two different Open Source rewriters and I opted for UrlRewriter.net which describes itself as:

UrlRewriter.NET is an open-source, light-weight, highly configurable URL rewriting component for ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. UrlRewriter.NET provides similar IIS Rewrite capabilities that the Apache web server provides with mod_rewrite and .htaccess. You don’t need to install an ISAPI Rewrite filter to use the component. Best of all, UrlRewriter.NET is free and licensed with a very permissive MIT-style licence.

I found it to be all of the above and the install/configuration to be very straightforward not to mention it has good online help and a support forum.

One caveat that I ran into though was that once installed at the root I started seeing this error in my other ASP.NET applications:

Server Error in '/blog' Application.

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Intelligencia.UrlRewriter' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (E:\web\xxxxxxx\htdocs\web.config line 11)

Source Error:

Line 9:    <system.web>
Line 10:     <httpModules>
Line
11: <add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, 


Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" /> Line 12: </httpModules> Line 13: </system.web>

Source File: E:\web\xxxxxxxx\htdocs\web.config Line: 11

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.1433; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.1433

The Fix

To fix this I added the following to the web.config files of my other ASP.NET applications removing the new assembly dependency:


          
            
            1
            <
            system
            .web
            >
            
            
            2
            
            
            <
            httpModules
            >
            
            
            3
            
            
            <
            remove 
            name
            ="UrlRewriter"
            
            
            />
            
            
            4
            
            
            </
            httpModules
            >
            
            
            5
            
            
            </
            system.web
            >

If you’re aware of other options that don’t require changes to every web.config I’d love to hear about them. At any rate, while I haven’t decided to switch blog engines yet I now have the pieces in place to do just that.

What do you use for URL rewriting particularly in a hosted environment?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Topping 1,000 RSS subscribers is perfect time to say thanks!

Steve Trefethen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:33:50 GMT

Today, April 16, 2008 according to FeedBurner my blog topped 1000^*subscribers! I think that makes it a good time to say thanks to all those who have subscribed. So, Thank You!

I started blogging June of 2004 on Borland's blog server which eventually morphed into CodeGear blogs. In October of 2006 I decided to "go it alone on stevetrefethen.com and shortly thereafter started using FeedBurner to track subscribers. Here’s a graph of subscriber count:

Here’s a graph of the matching Google Analytics over the same period:

In early 2007, there was a bunch of activity surrounding Borland’s CodeGear announcement not to mention I was featured on CodeGear’s home page for awhile.

Lastly, what would a post like this be without the obligatory call to action...

If you haven’t already, Subscribe now!

* - Btw, I fully grok the fact that FeedBurner’s count may not be entirely accurate but it’s a fairly standard metric widely used on blogs so I’ll take it.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

C# Source Code Formatting Preferences

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:37:05 GMT

I just tried checking in some C# code and ran into a merge error so I fired up Araxis Merge and noticed hundreds of unexpected changes all to whitespace! That was a bummer because I just wanted to check in and call it a night but alas, it’ll have to wait a day. Now, I know code formatting can be a religious issue but...

Here are a few examples, the actual code of which is unimportant for the purposes of this discussion:

1publicvoid foo(string locator)
{ 2try { 3if (selenium.IsElementPresent(locator)) 4break; 5 } catch (Exception)
{ 6 } 7}

and

 1publicvoid foo(string locator)  2{  3try 4 {  5if (selenium.IsElementPresent(locator))  6break;  7 }  8catch (Exception)  9 {
} 10}

I’d call the latter more "mainstream" as the majority of Open Source projects I’ve looks at (including dasBlog, FileHelpers, RssToolkit, SubSonic, CCNET and SubText) all seem to align the braces with a few exceptions like the empty catch block or a single statement block. I haven’t downloaded the .NET sources yet but I’d be interested to know what Microsoft uses.

Chuck Jazdzewski, a well known 'softie publishes a good deal of C# code on his blog formatted using the top style. A few colleagues, John Waters, Falafel's CTO and Adam Andersen have both blogged using the latter style, here and here respectively.

Which do you prefer? Do you consider either more "mainstream" than the other?

[Update: April 15, 2008] Added a list of OS projects I've looked at.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Microsoft delivers "Feature Packed" update to Visual C++ 2008

Steve Trefethen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:38:59 GMT

Microsoft just announced the release of Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack which, albeit a bit late arriving, includes an impressive feature list:

Look & feel support for...
- MS Office
- Visual Studio
- Internet Explorer
Visual Studio Docking
Auto hide windows
Vista theme support
Menu/toolbar customization
Shell management and more

If all this stuff is as good as it sounds it would appear Microsoft finally delivered on what Steve Teixeira said they were going to do. To top it all off the whole thing is a free download. I wonder if/when they’ll do the same for WinForms. Btw, I’d imagine this will make a few third party component vendors squirm a bit.

[UPDATE: April 10, 2008] Changed the wording of the last sentence to clarify that I meant "component" vendors based on Oliver's comment where I think he implies that I meant CodeGear which was not the case.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Google's App Engine and Amazon's web services leading us "into the clouds"

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:01:25 GMT

o, Google releases Google App Engine a cloud computing service for building web applications in Python. Very cool! Over the coming days and weeks I’m sure there will be plenty of comparisons with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud for us to consume. Cloud computing is an interesting model, one where I believe an independent dev tools company could flourish.

In fact, before leaving CodeGear I sat down with Jim Douglas to discuss ideas around web development focusing on the growing eco-system of web services that companies are publishing on what now seems like a daily basis. The discussion covered a variety of web services available as well as platforms like Facebook, all things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. To the right is a photo of a page from my developer’s journal which outlines a concept I had (in March 2006) for extending Delphi applications, including the IDE, using web services. For those of you familiar with Delphi’s ToolsAPI it’s like extending the IDE, or any Delphi application, without installing/updating binaries on the local machine. The net effect is it affords the small company the opportunity to deliver more features faster with less impact to their installed base as opposed to getting stuck on a designer. With the advent of so many different API’s from so many different companies I think there’s a good opportunity for a company to stitch these services together and provide developers an entire toolset for use within their applications.

Over the past few years we’ve really witnessed the web grow into an honest to goodness platform and I think Facebook’s salvo really helped lead the way. Initially, we’ve seen the explosion in the world of social networking which I believe is largely due to the allure of ad revenue from millions of page views fueled by viral growth.

Eventually, with things like the Elastic Compute Cloud and Google Apps Engine I believe we’ll see more mainstream web application development move "into the cloud". Today, to leverage Amazon’s services it’s like working with Legos where you need piece things together to build out a site. One example I think illustrates the difference between Amazon and Google is Amazon’s Copy Proposal for S3 read it and let it sink in. I think that illustrates a fundamental difference between how these services are likely to evolve. On the other hand Google’s App Engine appears to be a more well rounded service which will make it interesting to watch Amazon’s response.

One thing is for sure, we won’t likely see Amazon or Google or Microsoft or IBM develop tools that would allow developers to leverage services from many different companies which is where I believe there is an opening for something creative to occur. I guess time will tell who will jump at that opportunity as it’s not likely to come from one of the big name players. I think this idea is already happing in the social network arena where sites like Plaxo and FriendFeed are aggregating data from a number of different services.

Another cool thing about moving "into the cloud" is the opportunity to use whatever OS you want on your local machine. I’m using a MacBook Pro and I’d love the opportunity to boot to the other half of my hard drive and work in OSX for awhile.

Btw, just landed in my inbox:

Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine! Your account has been activated, so you can begin building applications!

Looks like it could be a long night!

What’s your take on cloud computing?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Considering a switch from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:06:07 GMT

I use dasBlog for my blog engine and recently there have been discussions on the dasBlog dev mailing list about its future. The current discussion centers around starting a new code base and leveraging Microsoft’s new technology. As a result I decided to take a look around at other .NET blogging engines starting with BlogEngine.NET. As advertised it’s very easy to setup and configure which is a good sign. The next step was to import my existing blog data including posts, comments etc. and I found Merill Fernando’s post on this subject helpful, thanks Merill!

Merill’s post lead me to Paul Van Brenk’s dasblog BlogML importer which worked great after a minor tweak for comments without author names that caused the export to fail. Thanks to Paul for providing source thus allowing me to save time and tweak his code and get the import working. The problem was a null reference exception importing blog comments which was easily fixed with a simple check.

Once all my data was imported it allowed me to realistically play around with BlogEngine.NET and experiment a bit. While in some cases it has some advantages over dasBlog there are a few issues that would prevent me from easily switching. The first would be ensuring my existing URL’s continue to work which could prove to be a bit of a challenge. I also have a few issues with things like meta tags though that’s would be easy to fix.

Even though BlogEngine.NET does offer some flexibility not available in dasBlog I’m beginning to think that perhaps holding out to see what happens with Microsoft’s MVC framework and in the dasBlog community itself may be the best option.

I’d be interested to hear from BlogEngine.NET users their opinion and what they like/dislike about it.

Lastly, is there another Open Source ASP.NET blog engine I should consider?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Links for 2008-04-06 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Tip/Trick: Integrating ASP.NET Security with Classic ASP and Non-ASP.NET URLs - ScottGu's Blog

My TEDTalks list

Steve Trefethen — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:20 GMT

I’ve blogged about a few TEDTalks I’ve enjoyed and finally decided to post my entire list of favorites, 15 and counting.

What are your favorites?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Reflecting on the past and the transition to .NET development

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:24:15 GMT

Having recently released my first major project after having left CodeGear/Borland I’ve found myself reflecting on the last few years and my decision to leave CG. It seems particularly apropos as my first Falafel review was today.

For awhile back in late 2006 early 2007 I’d felt like I was in a rut and watching all kinds of cool things happening in the .NET world. A few years earlier, I’d made the decision to work on Internet technology because I felt it was important and early on had me working on things like ISAPI thread pooling back in 2002 which was cool. Eventually, when Borland decided to get into .NET with C#Builder I got to work on the ASP.NET designer with Jim Tierney which was a great experience and served to "keep my head in the game". I learned a lot about .NET and ASP.NET in particular and had the chance to write my first designer from the ground up. I used to wonder how many people Microsoft had working on their ASP.NET designer? I bet it was more than two.

The up hill battle

Prior to leaving Borland for Microsoft in 1999 I’d spent a great deal of time working on what eventually became the core of the ASP.NET designer, the integration of the MSHTML control. Even with all the capabilities we were able to wring out of it I became very discouraged trying to keep pace with Microsoft’s designer. When VS.NET 2005 RTM’ed it really hit me hard because I knew Delphi’s ASP.NET designer simply wouldn’t catch up at least not on the trajectory it was on. I recall many difficult conversations about which direction to take including dropping the designer entirely and focusing on creating a richer code editor experience geared towards web development. The primary issue was that Microsoft’s WebForms architecture placed an incredibly heavy burden on the design environment in an attempt to make it function like VB, Winforms and VCL designer’s developers had grown to love.

I was frustrated not spending time working on framework code people could leverage in their own applications and instead putting every last minute into the designer which, in the end, is more or less geared towards trivial applications. A fact that’s true even of Microsoft’s ASP.NET designer which has diminishing returns as the complexity of an application grows. Not a good value add proposition. For me, it was a pretty dark time and I didn’t feel my efforts were headed in the right direction, a point amplified when I attended Google Developer Day in May '07. To be honest, I found myself sitting through session after session wondering why I was the only CG developer attending this free conference a mere 15 miles from the office thinking the entire team should have been there. You could say it was an epiphany of sorts 28 days before what would be my last day.

Another issue I struggled with was believing CG would eventually be freed from Borland’s confines. It’s been just over two years since the original announcement and to my knowledge still no word. Then there’s the decline in BORL stock, dropping an astonishing 70% in the eight months following my departure. While I managed to survive a dozen or more layoffs in 15 years I’m glad I dodged what must have been a nerve racking free fall.

Basically, there was a lot on my mind this time last year.

Life in the .NET world

Back to the point, it’s been a welcome change working exclusively in .NET and in many ways a reprieve from Win32. I’m enjoying the .NET ecosystem and learning lots of new tools which is something I wasn’t really aware I missed on the Win32 side. I think one of the key things that Microsoft was missing prior to .NET was a runtime that developers could "party on" (to quote an old Microsoft phrase) and with .NET they have that in spades.

Probably one of the most liberating things has been getting away from the Windows API and focusing less on the individual function calls and more on solving real world problems. The other day Mark Edington called me regarding a SendMessage question and I can’t say I really miss those days. Another exciting piece is knowing that there is lots more to explore like all the new features in C# 3.0. Admittedly, I really struggled not having the constant drum beat of language innovation present in the .NET world.

.NET Tooling

Speaking of tools one of the most enjoyable parts of .NET development for me has been using VS.NET, NDepend, NUnit, NCover and writing code that’s easier to test supporting things like Mock Objects. Reflection is a beautiful thing. I’ve also enjoyed the .NET Open Source community including dasBlog, CruiseControl.NET, FileHelpers , edtFTP , ScrewTurn , SubSonic and many others. I think the past nine months have done a lot to reinvigorate me as a developer and I’m feeling more engaged and learning more now than I had in years in Win32 land. It’s interesting to think the guy I sat right across the hall from had so much to do with launching both these development communities.

What’s your .NET experience been like?

[UPDATED: April 1] Fix link.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Worst cold I've ever had

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:29:59 GMT

Over the past 14 days I’ve had arguably the worst cold I’ve ever had in my life. Granted, it was a cold nothing life threatening nor terribly serious but I simply can’t recall being that suppressed by a cold. It started two weeks ago after two of my kids had gotten what now seems like a rather mild version of the same thing cough fever etc. The first few days were tough with coughing and aches from head to toe. That eventually switched to near migraine nasal pressure (I can’t say I’ve ever had a migraine but I can imagine now what it must be like) which continued relentlessly for days. I lost 6.5lbs, had fluid in my lungs and a pretty wicked cough and on the ninth day I started antibiotics.

Now, 15 days later and I’m feeling much better and getting back into the swing of things. I missed more days of work two weeks ago than I’d missed in 15 years at Borland! Anyway, I’m anxious to get back to the weight room and restore some of the muscle mass that disappeared.

[Updated: March 31] Fix typos.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Links for 2008-03-24 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

htm2pdf | convert your html to pdfs

Why Agile isn't good for shrink wrapped Product development

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:28:21 GMT

Preamble: Here’s a post I wrote nearly a year ago which I’ve sat on until now. I know the Agile vs. Waterfall (or whatever other development methodology) issue has been rehashed a great deal but now that I’m working as a consultant and particularly after having pushed my first project into production, I felt it was time to hit the "post" button.

First, notice that the in the title the "P" in Product is a capital letter. When I was at CodeGear (CG), there was an effort to use Agile software methodology and I reached a point where I felt it was not good for large, complex, version 10.0 code bases sold through channel sales for profit. To me the Agile Manifesto describes what I’d refer to as a "close combat" software development that calls for the ultimate flexibility necessary to adapt quickly to a dynamic situation. But that level of flexibility comes at a high price, like close combat itself, given the unpredictable nature of a dynamic environment. It’s been my experience that that’s not retail product development and what I’ve come to realize over the years is that if you fail to evolve your development process along with your product your chances for success will likely follow.

For me, what came out of the formal Agile training I received while at CG and a year spent using the process is that it was worth learning but the team would have benefited more by not trying to completely switch lock, stock and barrel (first mistake). The first clue, which admittedly I missed, came during the training where it was made clear there would be a "transition period", lasting potentially several iterations before each mini-team could accurately "calculate" it’s velocity. With 20-20 hind sight I believe a better approach would have been to start with a complete review of what was wrong with the existing process and an analysis of why Agile was necessary. I now believe what we did was probably typical of many teams as the "Agile mentality" washed over the shores of development engulfed us all.

We (the development teams at CG) bought into the whole thing, got training, switched project management software, started SCRUM meetings, daily stand-ups, a backlog the works. That was wrong. I think it was too much change all at once and when the product requirements changed late in the process we reconfigured the team to respond accordingly and wound up relying on an older tried and true development process that had been used for years. At that time, CG polled it’s customer base and with that knowledge decisions where made to refocus on other areas of the product. The interesting thing is that Agile more or less fell by the way-side and no one really seemed to skip a beat. We needed a complete RTM plan with priorities and requirements pitted against hard dates. And yes, dates were, and I presume still are significant as CG works towards becoming an independent company. We desired many of the principles of Agile though many of which aren’t new nor unique to Agile. I mean who doesn’t want:

Satisfied customers
Sustainable development
Technical excellence
Motivated individuals

If your team hasn’t switched to Agile or is perhaps considering switching you need to take a long hard look at your current process and at the very least get your ducks in a row before you decide that a true culture change is best for your team.

I think Agile fits particularly well in the world of contractors (of which I’m now a member), internal facing application development and IT and in those worlds makes a lot more sense. I’m now doing contracting work and I think working on small deliverable chunks over short periods of time is a great way to sustain a project. In fact, working as a contractor on a project several years ago, I didn’t focus enough on Agile principle #1:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Which directly lead to the end of the contract. Needless to say, lesson learned.

Relevant Links

Post-Agilism: Process Skepticism
Agile people still don’t get it
Accountability in a Scrum World
The start of the end for Agile software development?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.