The term “software artifact” is often seen as being about only the runnable bits of a program: what’s the steps to getting ideas to bits running on machines. However, as you move through aspects of the software development lifecycle various (non-executable) artifacts are created - even in Agile environments! To me the important part about any…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Leading Technical Change across the Herd. Software has evolved from a team activity to teams activity: multiple teams, each with their own Microservices, where a single user request’s calls a service which then calls another service to look something up, which calls another service, etc. A single request may spawn many requests inside the…| blog.wilcoxd.com
In grooming and backlog refinement in software we find ourselves breaking functionality into epics, which then have many stories, and - from here I like to break stories explicitly into behaviors, or at least acceptance criteria. With stories classified into epics you may be able to, upon completion, see the larger business functionality, and where…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Introduction We’re all familiar with the idea of technical debt in software, where the velocity of development is hampered by code not being ideally suited for the task at hand. Maybe the task changed, maybe an engineer had an idea that didn’t turn out so well, maybe the data model forced an unnatural shape. for more on technical debt O’reilly has…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Scaling Specialized Expertise Modern software engineering is very enabling to an individual engineer, but with that enablement comes complexity. Likewise, even in areas we would consider “old news” the complexity of admistrating, operating, and interacting with those systems doesn’t go away. When you’re dealing with optimizing that Postgres query…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Intro In my earlier software projects and planes of growth I posited that software projects have five steps of growth: foundations, testing, specialization, process, stabilization, and self actualization. I talked very little about what stabilization means in that article, and I’m going to define it a bit here. Stabilization looks different for…| blog.wilcoxd.com