Videos! For "Platonic Solids of Quality" and "Functional Programming and Django QuerySets"

I've been remiss in posting my videos.  The last two talks went really well

- Platonic Solids of Quality

As people who produce awesome stuff, there are a lot of tools we can use to work less and simplify our workflow. This talk introduces many techniques from Agile Testing and other sources so we can all do more things faster.

- Functional Programming and Django QuerySets

This talk is a quick overview of Python iterators and why to use them, then combining iterators in Functional Programming (vs procedural and object oriented programming). Lastly I show how to use these ideas in order to better understand and test Django QuerySets.

I have another talk video somewhere, but it's about using Selenium for testing and thus has rather a bit of profanity in it.  No link.

Thanks to Don Westland for recording-editing these for me!

Ultimate Quality Development System

Our friends at Divmod have come up with an extremely clear method of rapidly delivering high quality software. The basic idea is you write a bug report, create a code branch, then check in the branch with a "review" tag. When someone reviews and okays your code, you merge into the trunk. This method has lots of benefits, including taking the drama out of peer review, and making it very easy to safely test on multiple platforms.

http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/UltimateQualityDevelopmentSystem

(via Twisted)

Kanban Development Oversimplified

I loved this article It's clearly written, with a brief descriptions of the large numbers of tradeoffs within the Agile ecosystem. Specifically, choosing a different size length of time to develop each feature makes a huge difference. I've been using very small, one-day timeboxes. The article notes that larger boxes, four weeks, can often help the client make meaningful, business-oriented decisions vs going over each bit of minutia.

Agile Software Development

I suggest everyone run, not walk, to read Alistair Cockburn's "Agile Software Development (2nd edition)." He talks about how people learn, and how Agile turns software development into a "cooperative game", like rock climbing. That is, developers have different roles, and each role supports the others so the team can progress farther, producing more software features to deliver to the client.

The author's notes on how people learn helped me immediately in my teaching practice. My classes are both more accessible (can help more people) and more focused (presenting more sophisticated knowledge.)

(Note the 2nd ed is a bit different from the 1st, and so recommended.)