Category: Joel Spolsky

Hallway feedback

November 29, 2006 by Artem

Agile software development processes by any definition encourage the in- and-out team communication via various practices from pair-programming to informative workspace to retrospectives. With the respect to all the usual practices there is one more often underestimated way of getting the in-team feedback - the hallway testing. The term Hallway Usability Test coined by Joel Spolsky stands for "grabbing the next person that passes by in the hallway and forcing them to try to use the code you just wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code."

How two hours have to waste two weeks

November 15, 2006 by Artem

Today Joel Spolsky criticized the agile software development methods a hypothetical story by Dmitri Zimine.The story tells about Sarah the programmer, that had to spoil the whole two week iteration by complying to the urgent two hours long request of her project manager.

The issue that bothers Joel and makes him suspicious about the agile camp is the fact that the request could be really urgent and failing to implement it really soon might have cause a huge sale loss.

Multitasking in the workspace

October 30, 2005 by Artem

On Joel's Multitasking in the Workplace

Multitasking in the Workplace:
Joel Spolsky, a known writer on software development related topics is a long standing advocate of private offices for every developer, perfect working conditions and managers whose main role is to “move furniture out of the way, so people can concentrate on their work”. Lately he found the support in the published in the NY Times research report claiming that in the cubicle space people loose hell a lot of time on interruptions. I believe that there is a proven way to unite the advantages of the open-space communication and private office focus.