RockyCode

Recently, I had the opportunity to look at a set of user stories on an upcoming project and apply a high level estimate to each. These estimates were going to provide a starting point for determining project timeline and schedule. Every time I'm presented with a request for estimation, I shiver a little because I'm so bad at it. As I understand it, I'm not alone in this weakness. I have found, however, that the more requirements that can be defined and the more detail that can be described for each, the more accurate a timeline can ...

I recently read Release It! by Michael Nygard. I became interested in this book when the NFJS 2008 panel cited it as their #1 suggested read. In my view, the essence of Nygard's expose boils down to two points:

1. One can build software that passes QA with flying colors and still fails miserably in real environments.
2. Problem in production are unavoidable. Good software will be able to navigate them as gracefully as possible.

That said, the book was mostly conceptual, offering real-world examples of how antipatterns in software development made problems that were encountered even worse. Then ...