How could you not attend a conference presentation with a title like that? I hasten to add that it was not my house that burned down; I had to assume that it was a house belonging to (or somehow associated with) one of the two presenters Yves Hanouelle and Robin Dymond — and that the story had something to do with agile software development. Now that two weeks have passed, I have to admit that I’m not even surer whose…Read More

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away — before Google, before the PC, before the widespread non-academic/military use of the Internet, perhaps even before the invention of fire and electricity — my colleagues and I were bemused and intrigued by the reaction we got from veteran software developers and project managers when we wandered all over the world (including some pretty scary places where programmers brought machine guns to work), preaching from every soap-box we could find…Read More

During the week of Aug 9-13, I trekked down to Orlando, Florida to join some 1,400 other computer geeks for a week-long conference known as Agile2010. If you were there, you don’t need me to tell you what it was all about; and if you’ve never heard of it, it’s easier for me to point you to the conference website than trying to provide my own feeble explanation. This conference, along with “sister” conferences on the related topics of XP…Read More