Can You Measure It?
For years there have been two elementary schools in Fort Scott. Eugene Ware Elementary School on one side of town and Winfield Scott Elementary School on the other. This year the school board voted to...
View ArticleKeep From Giving Away Passwords Like Gawker
Some time ago I made a comment on Lifehacker.com. In order to comment I had to create a login. I used an email account that I mainly use for junk email and a simple password. In the past week, some...
View ArticleTapestry 5.2.4 Out
I have been doing quite a bit of work with Apache Tapestry. In the past week, Tapestry 5.2.4 has been released and is worth checking out. Coming from a WebObjects background, Tapestry seems like a...
View ArticleAgile Principles vs. Agile Practices
When people see a successful Agile team, the first thing they start looking at is all the practices the team is doing. They notice the daily stand ups, iteration reviews, test driven development,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mark Shead’s Home Office
For the past 13 years my primary office has been in my home. During this time I’ve experimented with a lot of different things from simple small desks in Mexico to large glass topped workspaces. Here...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Do Some People Hate Agile?
Why do people hate agile?Imagine that there is some group of people that speak English, but never learned to read or write. Someone literate shows up and explains that you can make marks on paper to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Teaching Class on Git
I spent some time this past week teaching a class on Git for the Treasury Department. We had a lot of fun. I used Digital Ocean to spin up an instance for the students instead of the AWS instances I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Agile in Name Only
Last minute travel plans had me looking for a way to get some dry cleaning done with faster turn around than what my local dry cleaner could provide. We had to go to Joplin for a few hours before...
View ArticleTest Driven Development
When you start using Test Driven Development, it is easy to get so excited about having regression tests that you miss the point of using tests to drive the actual development process. While regression...
View ArticleWhat is Agile?
Many things get called Agile—especially by people who are selling something. Agile is defined in the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto makes it clear that Agile isn’t a methodology. It isn’t a specific...
View ArticleAgile Practices
While it is always important to remember that Agile is a set of values and principles, it can be useful to look at some of the practices that teams implement when following Agile. (If you haven’t read...
View ArticleCreating Good User Stories
Hi I’m Mark. I help organizations write software more efficiently. A big part of this is helping teams find ways to organize their work in a way that follows Agile values and principles. In this...
View ArticleSplitting User Stories – Agile Practices
Hi I’m Mark. I help organizations write software more efficiently. The Agile principles say that we should try to deliver software to the user frequently and that we need to do our best to strive for...
View ArticleWhat is Agile Methodology?
Agile is a set of values and principles yet people are constantly asking about “Agile Methodology.” If you want to know more about agile values and principles, take a look at my video called “What is...
View ArticleWhat is Behavior Driven Development?
Test Driven Development is the process of using examples to guide the development of each function of your software. In TDD you create your program by working through a loop like this: Write an...
View Article
