Sunday, November 18, 2007
One of the best things about working in a software shop that has embraced the principles and practices of agile software development is the continued focus on what's really important.  Every week, our product manager and our business analysts are forced to think about what the most important piece of functionality is that can be added to our software.  I'm sure it's frustrating for them to have to, week after week, put things that seem relatively important on the back burner for those things that are most important. 

Focusing on the most important things can be frustrating, and it can lead to business trying to slip "easy" things into iterations whenever possible.  I believe this is a symptom of having to make so many concessions each and every week.  Since they never get everything they want, it's the "easy" things that are the most tempting to add.  However, I'm of the belief that "easy" is never good.  Doing something because it's easy, is doing something wrong.

It's no secret that a lot of software that is developed today is total crap.  It's loaded with feature upon feature.  It's hard to use, and doesn't do anything that helps the user kick ass.  Anybody can do "easy"....you don't want to be just anybody do you?

Sunday, November 18, 2007 5:25:35 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) | Comments [2] |  | #
Friday, November 16, 2007
As someone who is working in a software shop building an extensive set of SOAP based web services via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) it's refreshing to have posts like this that make you feel like what your doing is right on the money....or not! :)  For internet facing web services I agree with Dare that REST is where it's at.  I'm not convinced that they're the answer for all problems....at least not yet.

For anyone unfamiliar with RESTful web services I recommend you pick up RESTful Web Services  by Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson. About 6 months ago I started reading a draft copy of it and was very impressed.  It provides an excellent introduction to how to build RESTful web services and explains many of the core concepts that are necessary for fully grokking REST. 

Friday, November 16, 2007 1:47:33 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) | Comments [0] |  | #
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