Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: WebEx

Guest: Christof Ebert

Christof Ebert, managing director of Vector Consulting Services talks with Frances Paulisch on his insights to how lean applies to product development. The interview centers around five key principles of lean development, namely end-to-end focus on creating value for the customer, eliminating waste, optimizing value streams, empowering people, and continuously improving. This IEEE podcast addresses lean software development as opposed to management or manufacturing theories. In that context, we sought to address some key questions: What design principles deliver value, and how are they introduced to best manage change? Many practical examples illustrate how to introduce lean without strangulating development.

• IEEE Software special issue on lean development
• Guest editors’ introduction
• Vector Consulting Services on efficiency improvement
• Lean development presentation of Christof Ebert

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Recording Venue: Paddington, London

Guests: Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson, Atlantic Systems Guild

Neil Maiden, Editor of the Requirements column in IEEE Software, talks with Suzanne and James Robertson of the Atlantic Systems Guild about the emergence and impact of agile practices on requirements work. The interview begins with an exploration of how agile practices have changed requirements work. Suzanne and James introduce an important distinction between “Agile” and “agile”, then use it to drill down on how agile can address emerging important topics such as innovation. They close with thoughts about the future of requirements work in an agile world.

• Atlantic Systems Guild
• Suzanne Robertson
• James Robertson
• Neil Maiden

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage

In this episode, we talk with Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler about database evolution and agile database development. We discuss the basic challenges for working with a database in an agile development culture and how to include database design and most of all, database evolution, in the usually short development cycles of modern software development methods. We talk about continuous integration for database-related code changes using scripted database schema changes, the usage of multiple database schemas to overcome centralized deployments for development teams, how to migrate data in incremental steps, and what tools can help in this agile environment. We discuss how to break down database refactorings in small and incremental steps, one of the most important parts of integrating database changes into an agile development flow.

• Database Refactorings
• Evolutionary Database Design
• Martin Fowler
• Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design
• Recipes for Continuous Database Integration

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Jurgen Appelo

In this episode Michael interviews developer, manager, and book author Jurgen Appelo on the topic of management in agile organizations: leading agile developers. They talk about the need for a different style of management compared to previous command and control styles used to lead organizations. In going through the best practices that are also covered by his latest book Management 3.0, they cover topics like: Energize People, Empower Teams, Align Constraints, Develop Competence, Grow Structure, and Improve Everything – which are the six views he uses to explain his experiences.

• Management 3.0 
• Jurgen’s Blog

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Bas Vodde

Host: Michael

In this episode Michael talks with Bas Vodde about how to apply agile principles to large and distributed development organizations. Bas shares his experiences on working in, consulting and coaching companies to adopt Scrum for large scale software development. Together Bas and Michael explore common problems and how organizations deal with these problems. Problems such as how to move to a feature-centric organization, how to get peoples buy-in in the transition or why to base large-scale development on Scrum.

Links:

• Odd-e
• Feature team primer
• Lean primer
• CppUTest page
• Book
• Practices book
• Craigs home page

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest: Kent Beck

Host: Martin

In this episode we talk with Kent Beck about this tiny little thing he created many years ago and that has changed the daily work of many many programmers in the world: automated unit testing and JUnit. We briefly revisit the history of JUnit, talk about how things began and what has happened since then. We discuss test-driven development (TDD), talk about when to do TDD and when not, and chat about experiences in the wild. The episode closes with some personal thoughts about the future of testing and software engineering in general.

Links:

• JUnit at GitHub
• JUnit Max
• Test-Driven Development – By Example
• Poker Workout

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest: John Wiegand

Host: Martin

This time we have John Wiegand on the mic for an episode on architectures and agile software development. We talk about the role of architectures in an agile world and why architectures change and need to change over time. We discuss the characteristics of those living architectures, using the Eclipse and the Jazz projects as examples, and the surrounding development methods for such environments.

Links:

• The Eclipse project
• Jazz community site
• RESTful architecture style at Wikipedia

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Jens Coldewey

Host(s): Markus
In this episode we’re talking to Jens Coldewey about his experiences in 10 years of introducing agile techniques to project teams. We discuss real-world examples and the lessons learned and strategies derived from them.

Links:

• Jens’ Blog (in German)
• Jens’ Homepage

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Recording Venue: JAOO 2007
Guest(s): Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Host(s): Markus
In this episode, Markus talks to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on what she has learned from architecture reviews. This is a very complement to the earlier episode on architecture evaluation.

Links:

• Rebecca’s Website
• More of her Writings

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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2007
Guest(s): Dave Thomas

Host(s): Markus
This episode is an interview with Dave Thomas (OTI Dave or Smalltalk Dave, not PragDave). We started our discussion with a look at the (non-)success of objects and components. We then discussed some history behine Eclipse and Dave’s role in OTI. We then compared Smalltalk and Ruby and looked at the promises of small and powerful languages such as Lisp. We also discussed the role of (static) type systems and the role of tool support for languages.

We then switched gears and looked at what is necessary to scale agile development to the level of large organizations
and how techniques from lean production and manufacturing as well as product management can play an important role.

In the last part of the interview we looked at the state of research today, and especially the relationship between industry and academia in this area.

We concluded the interview with Dave’s opinion on what it takes to be a good developer.

Links:

• Another company Dave is involved in: Object Mentor
• Dave’s company, Bedarra Research Labs
• Dave Thomas’ website
• Object Technology International (OTI)
• Lean Software Development (Poppendieck)

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