Monday, April 14, 2003

Agile Modeling I have been looking into Agile Modeling over the last week or so. I have looked at this subject before but never in too much depth. I was inspired to investigate deeper when an ex-colleague of mine told me that he had been instructed to create models to descibe a couple of entity bean in infinite detail so that the development work could be off shored. This seemed ridiculous to me, he was spending more time developing the models that it would have taken for him to create the beans himself. This made me think about the worth of modelling, and when you have modeled enough to cut code. Lots of software development processes would say that you need to model everything to the minutest detail (e.g. RUP) so that you understand all of the problems that you might encounter. In my experience this does not work. You never really find out about a lot of problems until you start writting code to try and solve them. Things like performance for example, can not be easily modelled! Agile modelling has a number of 'Values' that define it, these are: Communication. Models promote communication between your team and your project stakeholders as well as between developers on your team. Simplicity. Itís important that developers understand that models are critical for simplifying both software and the software processóitís much easier to explore an idea, and improve upon it as your understanding increases, by drawing a diagram or two instead of writing tens or even hundreds of lines of code. Feedback. Kent Beck says it best in Extreme Programming Explained: ìOptimism is an occupational hazard of programming, feedback is the treatment.î By communicating your ideas through diagrams, you quickly gain feedback, enabling you to act on that advice. Courage. Courage is important because you need to make important decisions and be able to change direction by either discarding or refactoring your work when some of your decisions prove inadequate. Humility. The best developers have the humility to recognize that they don't know everything, that their fellow developers, their customers, and in fact all project stakeholders also have their own areas of expertise and have value to add to a project. An effective approach is to assume that everyone involved with your project has equal value and therefore should be treated with respect. These values seem to sum up the point of modeling to me, and bring out things that often get lost in the desire to define everything to the nth degree. People seem to forget that modeling is first and foremost about communicating a complex problem in a well defined way to make it easier to comprehend. If that means defining things down to the nth degree in order for someone to comprehend them, then I believe that there is something really wrong! Check out the Agile Modeling website for more detailed information 2:51:48 PM     Win2VNC A colleague told me about a cool little tool today. It is called Win2VNC. When combined with a VNC server, this tool allows you to control multiple machines with only one keyboard and mouse, no extra hardware required. The mouse moves seemlessley from one screen to the other. I am currently running this at work, and have it one keyboard and mouse controlling my XP box, my 2000 box and my MacOSX box! If you use more than one machine with more than one display this is an absolute must! 2:42:46 PM

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