One of the thing I really struggled with was coming up with a good name for my blog. Calling it by it’s domain name is the easy way out, and I tried a dozen taglines that all felt cheesy. “What am I going to do next?” sucked – so boring. I’m a decent marketer, so I needed a better “brand me”.

And that’s when it struck me, when I asked myself “What am I, goddamnit?”

I sometimes tell people I’m a “web developer”, but I feel much more business-oriented than that. And I’m not a programmer/hacker type with little business-sense. Other times I claim “serial entrepreneur” but that really disses my love for web/software development. I’m right in the middle, like many of us.

So today I coin the phrase “webdevelopreneur” and simultaneously create a more interesting name for my blog. Google search returned no results for “webdevelopreneur.”

Someone recently asked on xp-cinci mailing list:

• I need a pointer to an authoritative source containing some statistics (rough of course) of the cost savings of agile over waterfall. I’m not talking about just intial development of course, but something that includes the faster-delivery, cheaper-enhancement, etc, etc. Can anyone point me at something that will stand up to management scrutiny?*

Was an interesting question to me, so I did a little research on the subject, links below, but I’m not sure I’ve found any definitive answers.

• First I think basic education is usually in order. For that I point people to Wikipedia: AgileSoftwareDevelopment article to gain a quick overview of what Agile is, and how it compares to Waterfall. I think the Wikipedia entry presents a fair analysis, pro+con of Waterfall vs. Agile.
• I found a decent paper on results of agile methologies at Jim Highsmith’s website.
• If you want to go negative, point out how ridiculed Waterfall methodology is (Waterfall 2006), with comical contents such as The Glacial Methodology.
• Let their imagination run wild on the cost of premature estimation. Agile methdologies more effectively deal with the “Cone of Uncertainty” inherit in any project (graphic below).

Nice post over at TargetProcess on planning in a relatively agile way. Outline of steps:

• Identify users
• Define user goals
• Define user usage patterns
• Invent functional solution to satisfy user goals and usage patterns, and step-by-step outline of steps in each process
• Sketch UI’s on whiteboard and capture with digital camera
• Iterate UI a little to improve it
• Start development

This isn’t following a pure Agile methodology, but might be a useful transitional process away from a more rigid functional-spec-driven process.

While doing some research on running Agile projects with a geographically disperse team, I ran across this article by Martin Fowler which outlines how ThoughtWorks has been dealing with attempting Agile projects offshore. Great read!

Today we installed CruiseControl to provide continuous builds for our Microsoft .NET 2.0 solution. Last week, while researching general information on Agile methodologies for a management presentation, I came across this Wikipedia entry on “Cowboy coding.”

And I was saddened, in a way, that today we we witnessing the death of a cowboy, but celebrating the birth of an opportunity for higher quality software development. And I’m excited that it should provide the spark required to push us into full-fledged TDD. Whoopie-ti-yi-yo, get along you little dogies.