June 2007 - Posts
Tonight, I was scanning across the home page of CNN Money and noticed there was an article entitled "The 50 Who Matter Now". It is a ranking by Business 2.0 of people, products, trends, and ideas that are transforming the world of business. (I copied the description right out of the article.) It was no surprise to see some of the people included in the list: Steve Jobs, Tim O'Reilly, and the Google Trio. However, I was rather surprised when I reached # 18: Agile Software Development - a new approach to web-based code.
The article described the reason agile matters was that it is reshaping the way coders and entrepreneurs create web-based services. Their description was rather simplified, but it more or less effectively conveyed the point. Anyway, it caught me off guard to discover the mention of agile software development in an article posted on CNN Money. This got me to pondering whether agile is slowly gaining more ground as a mainstream development methodology.
I have been closely following the agile community over the course of the last year. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't claim to be an agile expert. Far from it. To be honest, I have never even been involved on a true agile project. However, I am a big fan of the principles and ideas that are driving the agile community. As a developer, it just screams at me as though this is the way that software should be developed. It has definitely caused me to develop a strong desire to begin applying those concepts, and I push for going that route quite often. Unfortunately, I have been met with considerable opposition when attempting to encourage agile adoption.
Based on my conversations with others, this has been the same problem for a lot of other developers that are interested in making the move to agile development. It would seem that most of the decision makers simply regard the agile process as hype, or they just don't see it as being beneficial. As a result, I just don't personally know many developers on a true agile team. I can actually count them on one hand. I envy those fortunate few. The rest of us feel like a group of heretics that must meet in secrecy at the risk of being executed. ;p
At any rate, it is encouraging to see agile development mentioned on something that is seemingly unrelated as CNN Money. Hopefully, this can be perceived as a sign that agile is slowly winning over the majority of the development community. However, only time will tell whether this is actually the case.
Thoughts?
For the last month, I have been trying to find the time to share my extensive collection of online resources. Rather than scattering all of it across numerous blog posts in an unorganized fashion, I have setup a dedicated page to serve as a central repository for all of my links that could potentially be useful to other members of the developer community.
Right now, it is by no means complete or comprehensive. I plan on modifying it quite a bit over the next couple of weeks. However, please bookmark it and check it occasionally for updates. As the effort progresses, I may end up creating more than one page. Even if I decide to go that route, this page will be the table of contents.
Feel free to send me your feedback. Or, if you know a particularly useful resource, let me know and I will consider adding it.
Here is the page:
http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/pages/jeffs-resource-links.aspx
It's that time again.
The Birmingham .NET User Group will be meeting on Tuesday, June 12th at 6:30 PM. However, our meeting location has changed. Our space at CTS is no longer available. So, New Horizons has graciously offered to host our meeting. Here is the location information:
601 Beacon Pkwy, West
Suite 106
Birmingham, AL 35209
Live Map
It remains to be seen whether we will continue meeting there on a monthly basis. So, please stay tuned to the user group website or my blog for monthly meeting information.
Our speaker will be Mr. Arcane Code, aka Robert Cain of Southern Company. Robert will be delivering a presentation about SQL Server Compact Edition. If you aren't familiar with SQL Server CE, this will be a great opportunity to learn about some of the important features and discover how it could be leveraged in your own environment.
Here my standard blurb about the user group:
Birmingham .NET User Group is a member of INETA and focuses on topics related to the Microsoft .NET development platform. Membership is completely free. There is no charge for attending and/or participating in group events. Our members are mostly developers and IT professionals from a wide range of experience levels and backgrounds. Meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month beginning at 6:30 PM. Meetings typically last between one to one and a half hours. Visit our website and register to receive information about events and access to the forums.
For the fun of it, I decided to setup a FeedBurner RSS Feed for my blog today. I'm not really sure why I never created one, but the urge finally hit me this evening.
Based on my Community Server stats, most visitors come from various search engine hits. However, I do have a fair number of RSS hits as well. So, this should allow me to better analyze the manner in which people interact with my blog via RSS. For those that directly visit the website, I regularly monitor my Google Analytics account to see what is of interest to you guys.
At any rate, the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeffbarnes/dotNet.
Please let me know if you have any problems with the feed.
Disclaimer:The opinions and views expressed within this blog are solely my own and do not represent those of my employer or anyone else.