Arxius de General - Xavi Ivars

The future of agile software development, by Michael Dubakov

8 de march de 2023, 16:51 xavi 27 minut(s) de lectura Comments Off

Software penetrates every pore of human existence. We look up the weather info over the web, giving up on outdoor thermometers. We’re driving to destinations with GPS navigator (forget paper maps with their G7 sections on page 59). We turn on RunKeeper when riding a bike to calculate the average speed and run and boast in Twitter. We’re using software every single day of our lives. It seems we’re hugging our dear gadgets a lot more than our loved ones.

No one knows the exact how-to of writing great software fast, that’s the problem. Waterfall passed away at the crossing of 2 centuries, whereas new software development methodologies (agile) fail at solving the fundamental problems so far. We’re living in very [...] (mostra l'entrada completa)

Building a microservice in a day*

3 de january de 2022, 13:47 xavi 12 minut(s) de lectura Comments Off

* well, a bit more than a day 🙂

Some time ago, I wrote some automation for Softcatalà‘s website, aimed to automatically update some software download information that we offer on the site.

That piece of code was at the very bottom of my “list of code to be proud of”. Even if it was a relatively small, less than 1000 lines PHP single file, it was bad. It was, basically, breaking every single best practice and design principle that you can think of. Taking the SO from SOLID, as an example:

Single Responsibility: That code was doing a ton of things. Downloading data from third-party APIs, mangling data, parsing CSV, JSON and XMLs, updating WordPress’ database, reusing some [...] (mostra l'entrada completa)

Agile, or not agile

27 de august de 2021, 17:52 xavi 3 minut(s) de lectura Comments Off

Today I had an interesting conversation with a peer at work. We ended up discussing, in short, if we’re Agile (with capital A), or not.

One of the changes our company has gone through in the past couple of years (some of those I’ve been talking about in the Catalan version of this blog), is that we no longer have a team of Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches.

I don’t think having Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches immediately transform a company to be agile. Similarly, I don’t think not having such a team means the company is not agile.

“Agile” has become the standard term for Agile Software Development, a concept that was initially defined in the Agile Manifesto by [...] (mostra l'entrada completa)

(Lack of) Women in Tech, a diversity problem

3 de november de 2020, 11:49 xavi 7 minut(s) de lectura Comments Off

It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to start writing in this section of the blog, in English. While I usually write in Catalan (you can read my random thoughts here), I also wanted to start writing in English for different reasons. I want to improve my English writing skills, but I also want to have a tech focused blog where I can, potentially, reach out to more people.

And to start this new blog I wanted to focus on something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now, but it’s getting more and more important for me: Women in Technology (or should I better say “The lack of Women in Technology?).

I know is not a tech-specific topic, in [...] (mostra l'entrada completa)