Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Oh dear. It would appear that some people reading this blog and Twitter feed believe that I am writing specifically about them. Naturally, this makes them a little sensitive to the criticisms that I sometimes level at the industry and the comments/observations I make. Let me reassure everyone that the articles I write generally don't relate to any one client, or incident, or person, or project. There really would be little point in writing about anything that is only specific to one project; to be fair it would be deathly dull, and irrelevant to everyone else. Even in the rare case when there is a particularly interesting success or failure story, I ensure that names are changed, and generally wait a while as well before publishing to anonymise the problem and protect the guilty. And remember I have had people I have never worked with before accuse me (albeit lightheartedly) of spying on their project, so some observations must be common across multiple projects. Sometimes I pu

In my role as a software developer I have come across many strange attitudes to coding, but none so strange as the fear of changing code. A good example - I was working with a team trying to use XP techniques. I was hired as a XP developer to strengthen the team and get them over a busy patch - not as coach, but simply as someone who had developed Java code in an extreme agile environment. No problem there. The product we were working on required new functionality added to it. Since the current software structure did not easily accommodate the new stuff I mentioned in the stand-up that I would be restructuring the internals to make it fit more elegantly. This kind of refactoring is normal practice in any agile team, and is necessary to evolve the design with emerging requirements, keeping it coherent and stopping it from descending into a meaningless Ball Of Mud antipattern. I thought nothing of it. But one of the senior engineers threw his hands up in horror at the thought. "Yo