In my previous post I threw together a quick and dirty code coverage tool for C code. Well I decided to make it slightly easier for other people to use. I suspect that copy/paste off a blog post is not the prefered way to distribute Python scripts. So I have created a google code project for it: http://code.google.com/p/kludgecov/. I also made a few tweaks that should make it work even for code loaded via shared libraries.

I have been using nose and coverage for my python code and absolutely love the simple coverage report it spits out. It very quickly tells you what you missed. I wish I had the same thing for my C code. There is gcov, but it is very awkward, requires an instrumented executable, and never seems to work for me. I have also used callgrind (part of valgrind), the problem is that it tells you what DID executed. I am really interested in what DIDN’T execute, that is where the bugs can easily hide.

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This week I read a couple books about management and group dynamics. “Managing Humans” by Michel Lopp and “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. It turns out that they were both interesting and insightful. Not nearly as boring or painful to read as my geek instincts thought they would be.

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One of the least talked about and least understood of the 12 Extreme Programming (XP) practices is Metaphor.  Even Martin Fowler (who was involved in the birth of XP) doesn’t quite understand it.

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I found an article by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres entitle “Getting Started with XP”. In it they describe three different approaches to moving to an agile development model, with a focus on XP. It was a surprisingly pragmatic and reasonable discussion, which lacked the all or nothing attitude commonly associated with XP practitioners.

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Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) is a software development methodology that has some popularity, mainly in the UK. It is maintained by a consortium including companies like EDS and the Royal Bank of Scotland. As a result it is focused on the needs and desires of large corporations. These big corporations may not seem very agile, but DSDM bills itself as an agile methodology. They even have a FAQ discussing how they compare to and interoperate with SCRUM.

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I read an interesting article by Alistair Cockburn that delves into the exact link between using iterations and agile in software development. Unfortunately the article’s title “Are iterations hazardous to your project?” is a bit misleading. Cockburn is not trying to say that using iterations is a bad thing.

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Jeff Sutherland has mentioned that Scrum was developed in part based on Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Theory. Unfortunately he does not give any detailed description about the specifics of how CAS was used to develop Scrum. I did some Google-ing and found a master’s thesis by Jonas Bengtsson of the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden that attempts to clarify this link.

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I recently discovered that VMWare has release version 2.0.0 of their free Server product. I have been using VMWare server for a while now and have really like it. So I decided to give 2.0.0 a try to see what dramatic changes were in store. Well, I was right there were some serious changes, but not necessarily for the better.

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I started off with a very different title, something along the lines of “Why did Scrum and XP beat Lean.” My goal was to compare and contrast Lean with Scrum and XP, and explain why you hear about people using Scrum and XP, but not as much about Lean. It turns out that my original premise was based on a common misconception about Lean.

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