Author Archives: Jean-Pierre FAYOLLE

About Jean-Pierre FAYOLLE

Freelance consultant, blogger.

Agile Alliance – Technical Debt Initiative workshop

Do you remember this post ‘Agile Alliance Technical Debt Initiative‘ I did  in April, in order to announce the publication of some deliverables or our group? Well, we had our 2016 workshop last week, and this has been both a great event as a productive work for some promising outcomes this year.

Let me first remind you about the Agile Alliance Technical Debt Initiative: you will find everything on the corresponding page on the  Agile Alliance website:

What, did I forget to tell you that our workshop took place in Madrid? Nice place for our three days meeting and some very creative exchanges.

Modeling the Technical Debt

I will not list everything we did and what we plan to work on in 2016, but we got some interesting presentation from Declan about System archetypes and another presentation from Dan about some works he did in this area. The idea is to identify patterns in the creation of technical debt and its evolution, based not only on theory but also on practical field experiences.

Thierry is working on a dynamic modeling of technical debt, where I see a lot of potential. Imagine being able to use a tool to evaluate the impact of your technical debt by changing settings and configuration in order to adapt it to your context, your project, your Agile practices, etc. This would make technical debt visible to your organization, and help understand how it may evolve in the short and long term, depending on the decisions you take to manage it.

MadriAgil meetup

We took advantage of our presence in the Spanish capital to organize an event with MadriAgil. Jean-Louis did a short presentation of our group, the objectives, the work already done and Tom presented some slides about technical debt.

MeetupMadriAgil_TomThen we quickly moved to a session of the Dice of Debt game, forming teams of four players who had to decide a strategy to deal with technical debt.

MeetupMadriAgil_DiceofDebtEverybody did enjoy it, lot of fun, and the feedback was really great.

MeetupMadrAgil_FeedbackThis was also a good opportunity for our group to learn some lessons:

  • On the almost 40 participants, a good proportion of them was attending for the first time an Agile meetup: technical debt is a subject which interests and attracts, probably because it is a real concern for many people.
  • Declan asked to everyone to evaluate how bad is the technical debt on their project, on a scale from 1 (good) to 5 (very bad): a majority of 3 and 4.

MeetupMadridAgilTD

  • Maybe up to 80% of the participants were using Scrum practices on their project. This makes me think that there is some room for some operational ‘how-to’ manage technical debt on Agile projects.

We were all really enthusiastic after this event, and we hope that we will be able to hold it again, with other Agile communities in other cities.

There is also some work going on for an online version of the Dice of Debt game. And to create an online quizz to allow everybody to have a self-assessment of his knowledge about technical debt. There should be also a webinar, maybe more than one as there is so much to say on the subject.

It was great to meet again for this workshop, as everything cannot always be done with Hangouts, so let me finish with a photo of our group:

Agile Alliance Technical Debt Initiative Workshop – Madrid 2016

Workshop Madrid2016

Dan Sturtevant, Jean-Pierre Fayolle, Thierry Coq, Jean-Louis Letouzey, Declan Whelan, Tom Grant

Agile Alliance Technical Debt Initiative

I have not been doing much noise around it, but now has come the time to announce some work that we have been doing on the ‘Agile Alliance Technical Debt Initiative’.

I was waiting for the publication of some of our deliverables, now available on this same page, to write a post about our program and our group. You might not know Agile Alliance, but I am sure you have at least heard of the Agile Manifesto. Well, as said on this page, “The Agile Alliance was formed shortly after this gathering to encourage practitioners to further explore and share ideas and experiences.” Continue reading

Evaluation of an application portfolio with the 3D City model

Qualilogy_TechnicalDebt_PortfolioLast week, I presented the different levels of maturity in software quality and how the measure of the technical debt can help to progress through these different levels, for a proactive and optimized management of application quality.

On this occasion, I spoke of using technical debt as part of the evaluation of a portfolio of applications, along different axes. After this post, I was thinking about what I could do with a 3D graph of such a portfolio, using the eXcentia’s plugin ‘3D City Model’ (1).

I have already presented this plugin in previous articles: City Model, City Model – New release, Critical City where I explained how to customize the 3D graph using our own formulas, and finally the ABC metric to investigate the metric of the same name. Continue reading

Software Quality Maturity Model & Technical Debt

Software Quality Maturity Model & Technical DebtI suppose that you all know CMMI? This model developed by the Software Engineering Institute provides five levels of maturity in order to measure the quality of IT services, and best practices associated with this scale of five levels, in order to progress through it.

I will not write a whole post on this model, it is not the subject of this article, but I will try to present it simply, as I could summarize it to someone who knows nothing about project management and application development. Continue reading

Do Developers Dream of Automated Function Points? (II)

Qualilogy - Automated Function PointsWe talked in our previous post, about Function Points, a metric usually not known by developers, and if it could be useful to them.

Our answer was rather negative, especially if we consider that such an estimate is performed manually by consultants who rely on a complex process. There are many certifications whose purpose is to validate that a consultant knows these concepts and how to implement them correctly. Continue reading

Do Developers Dream of Automated Function Points? (I)

Qualilogy - Automated Function PointsThe title of this post is transposed from the title of a science fiction novel that you might know: « Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? », from the author Philip K. Dick.

This book served as the screenplay for the movie « Blade Runner » by Ridley Scott, in which a detective must find and neutralize androids that nothing can distinguish from humans. Continue reading

Predictions 2015

Prédictions Cloud 2015The beginning of a new year is always a period of good resolutions.

No, don’t worry, I will not announce the plan of the big manoeuvres for Qualilogy in 2015. First, there is no plan, and then I’m one of those 90% of people whose resolutions fail, and I do not think that making them public will improve this low success rate.

Simply, I have been thinking for a while (1) about the impact that the Cloud could have about applications management and programming best practices.

Continue reading

Happy New Year 2015

Happy New Year to all those who, year after year, contribute to the success of this blog Qualilogy.
2015 new year

Qualilogy2014-2In 2014, around 40 000 visitors, including more than 29 000 unique visitors, came to look at more than 70 000 pages.

I will soon do a review of statistics (by country, themes, etc.), but my PC died before Christmas and I am waiting for the next one to be delivered.

In Spain, the ‘Reyes Magos’ Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar are the ones who bring the gifts (no Santa Claus here), but either they are late for me, or I was not good enough during the past year 🙂

Best wishes for health, happiness and success in 2015

 

SonarQube upgrade

Upgrade SonarQubeIt’s been a long time since I updated my SonarQube environment. Six months or more, I’m still in version 4.2, while the latest version is a 4.5.1 LTS (Long Term Support). Therefore a good candidate for installation.

This article Walking the Tightrope: Balancing Agility and Stability on the blog SonarSource describes the aims and objectives of such a version. This 4.5.1 release not only offers corrections but also many changes and new features.

This is not the first post I write about a SonarQube upgrade, you will find them all together under this part SonarQube – Installation on my blog. This article will be more concise, with referrals to these previous and detailed posts, when needed. Continue reading