Polymorphic Rants

Here some interesting thoughts on TDD.

I’m just back from the ThoughtWorks Immersion in our Pune office and one of the most interesting concept that came back to London with me is lo-fi.

Yes, lo-fi: nothing about planning, TDD, gummy bears and other fancy core agile things.

Just about being lo-fi.

This has actually been a core concept for me in the last years, but hearing it from the trainers has been a pleasure confirm.

What do I mean with “being lo-fi” ?

That concepts are trillions of time more important than the way we capture the them.

Write your stories on cards, play with them, move the cards around, rip them off if they are useless.

Design, architecture and layout of a UI can be fleshed out on a whiteboard and captured with a photo; big flip-charts are working lot better of mails and Word documents for defining agreement in the team.

All these lo-fi techniques help you focusing on the values of what you’re doing: if after a design meeting you roll out a lovely UML class diagram  you will be a bit reclutant to throw it in the bin if in the next meeting the team decides to take a different solution just because ittook you a decent amount of time for creating it with all the necessary details with Visio).

If you’re able to work on your ideas and not on the artifacts you will keep your process light and flexible as you need, able to quickly adapt to changes and decided improvements.

And if at the end of your process (but only at the end !!) you really need to formalize all the outcomes, do it…but keep in mind that from that point in advance you will be naturally less open to changements.

Here we go.

Something like one year ago I switched to English as the main language for
this blog, now it’s time to complete the transition with a new name.

This doesn’t mean the content will change: I promise that all the entries will still be fairly useless and incomplete as in the past