Prescriptive vs. Descriptive

I like descriptive writing. (e.g. Ron Jeffries/Martin Fowler)

Basically, they describe what they've done and the outcome.

I dislike prescriptive writing. (e.g. Scott Ambler).

They describe what you should do to be successful.


I read a bunch of my previous blogs. The ones I like are descriptive, the ones I dislike are prescriptive. I'll try to be more descriptive.

Help with problems not with solutions

Are you leading an agile team?

One of my big (and hard) learnings has been that one of the key ingredients to a high performance team is how the leadership delegates responsibility.

I have found that helping people identify problems, and brainstorming with them (rather than for them) creates a great enabled team. It also creates a great relationship.

I have found that leadership for me, means letting the people I work for (my team) do what they think is best. They make great decisions. Any mistakes they make, they recover from. I like to help with advice, if they ask for it.

Here's a great article from the globe and mail on the subject: (sorry, you'll have to purchase it)
Caution: thinking encouraged here

Enthusiasm in an Interview

Remember that enthusiasm is important for an interview. Why are you doing this job? Do you like building software? Are you learning new techniques? Are you going to excel on my team? Are you going to grow on my team?

These are all questions I'm trying to answer for myself during that 30 minutes I have to decide whether or not you'll work out on our team.

A big factor is how enthusiatic you are. I know if you love what you're doing, you'll be working at being better everyday.

For those of you that are counting...

Our project has blown through 10,000 automated functional tests. Still another year to go.

170,000 lines of business code
230,000 lines of test code

Average # of lines per method: 5

# of great people working on the project: 62
# of customers 12
# of developers ~ 32
# of qa 5
# of teams 5

# of sprints: 24

Time to run 10,000 tests: 380 secs. TOO LONG.