I often come across research into things such as Agile development, ITIL, pair programming and other areas.  But the research is often quoted by fans of whatever the topic is. I am generally too lazy to confirm that the research is sound, so I generally ignore most of it. But here is some unbiased looking research (which I have not verified) into some areas of software development: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/nagappan-100609.aspx The areas I found most interesting were: – Test driven development provides better quality but is significantly slower then “code then test”.  I am in favour of quality over speed in deploying new code, but … Continue reading Research into software development

I had an interesting discussion in a workshop last week.  At the end of the second day someone asked me if “there have been any studies on stress levels for agile teams?” I claimed that there should be less stress (which there should) but several of the group replied that there is in fact more stress than people experienced before going agile. I wasn’t really satisfied with the conclusion of the discussion.  We left it with the shared agreement that There is no fundamental reason why teams need to become more stressed with changes such as agile, lean or kanban … Continue reading Agile, lean, kanban – more stress for the team?