This post is a result of a discussion about software development methodologies, which some of the people involved were convinced that Agile was just a chaotic way of getting a software product done.

The Agile software development methodologies are often mistakenly compared to cowboy coding and related to undisciplined developers. This couldn’t be more far from the truth. But before I continue, let me explain what Agile software development is.

Agile is a conceptual framework that tries to mitigate the risks in a project by developing software in a short amount of time. It’s an iterative method, and each iteration can last 1 to 4 weeks, having casual tasks from a complete project life cycle (planning, design, coding, testing and documentation).

Each iteration starts by defining the requirements (interaction stories) and ends with potentially market-ready software.

Teams have the ability to self organize as they speak directly with other team members and the stakeholders.

But what makes Agile really different from other methodologies is the fact that the entire process is adaptive. While others like the waterfall model, spend allot of time and effort trying to predict every aspect of the process, Agile just keeps going and adapts itself to whatever comes along. Just think about all the planning that the waterfall needs, and then if something changes, it goes back to the start. It’s slow and tends to resist change.

Of course that this is not suited for every software project. The best case for Agile is when you have a medium size project with a small team (up to 20 programmers), a constantly changing environment, and a demanding client that loves to add or remove features from the projects every new day (don’t they all do?) and is collaborative.

In the end, you get a happy client, because he is not locked up in a contractual negotiation, instead he collaborates in the project and has the freedom to change his mind whenever he feels that something should be different. Generally this also increases usability, because once again, the client/user took part in the process. Quoting Jakob Nielsen regarding Agile methods:

“Agile methods hold promise for addressing the many ways in which traditional development methodologies erect systematic barriers to good usability practice.”

You can read the article about usability and Agile methods by Jakob Nielsen right here.

There are some famous examples of Agile methods, like XP (Extreme Programming) or Scrum, and I will talk about them later in another post. For now, just concluding the title, Agile is probably the right way for most of today’s projects, specially in the Web 2.0 field. But it’s not easy to change to this kind of methodology, and requires everyone involved to collaborate intensively. If the change comes naturally, you will probably get great and fast results.

More about Agile:

• The New Methodology by Martin Fowler
• Agile Manifesto

This is hilarious, just watch the video!

Link: www.collegehumor.com/video:1886349, taken from here

The truth is that I’ve already heard allot about microformats, but I’ve never had the chance to search and read something more detailed about it. It all comes down to the Semantic Web.

By the time I write this post, a major “geek” event is taking place in Lisbon. I’m talking about Sapo Codebits (by the way, you can watch it live 24/7 here).

Yesterday at Codebits there were some interesting presentations, but the one from André Luis about Microformats, really caught my attention. If you’re interested in having a good introduction to this matter just read this presentation. The video hopefully will come out soon after the event that ends tomorrow.

So, now that I caught some interest in Microformats, I’ll soon be applying them on my web projects.

Links: microformats.org

The chassis improvements on this new version of the macbook, make my “blackie” look like a fragile matchbox. Nice piece of engineering.

The new trackpad is also a big improvement, and has some interesting new moves. The rest stays almost the same, and of course, deep down, there’s always that itchy feeling that makes you want to go out and buy a new one… :D

Unfortunately the new one it’s not mine :P.

OWASP European Summit – Portugal / Algarve – 4th – 7th November 2008
Setting the Web Application Security Agenda for 2009: OWASP Invites You to join Our Summit in Portugal
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_EU_Summit_2008

With the theme ‘Setting the AppSec agenda for 2009′, the OWASP Summit will be a worldwide gathering of OWASP leaders and key industry players to present and discuss the latest OWASP tools, documentation projects, and web application security trends. Join us in Portugal in just a few short weeks! This venue hosts a diverse selection of training courses along with technical and business tracks, making it THE place to learn about web application security and the resources OWASP has available for use today.

I’m pissed off. Because besides the fact that I only knew about this today, I also won’t be attending it due to the usual lack of time and the tons of projects that I have to deliver in the end of the week. Soon I’ll post some presentations of the event.

Yep, that’s it. I upgraded my Ubuntu box to the new 8.10 version. What’s new? Well, I already found some very nice details, like the eject icon near every mountable device (like in Mac OS X), the shutdown button merged with the switch user button, and the most important one that I’ve noticed so far: for the first time I have out-of-the-box sound in my rear speakers, which means that probably significant improvements have been made to audio.

A new darker theme (which I talked about here) is also included, and a new wallpaper (ugly and brown as usual), a new screen resolution configuration utility, the new Xorg 7.4 and also tabbed file browsing.

Until now everything seems to work just fine after clicking on the “upgrade distro” button in the update manager. Let’s wait and see and happens in the next few days.