We’ve helped a number of organisations successfully adopt pair programming, giving their teams the ability to increase productivity, improve knowledge sharing and enhance the quality of their software.
Made Tech Blog
How to survive your first tech talk
I hate public speaking. It’s one of those things that I avoid at all costs. Though when my Brother made me his best man, there was no getting out of delivering a speech. And when my colleague signed me up to a do a talk without my consent (thanks Chris!), there was no getting out of delivering a tech talk.
Design Patterns: Strategy
Design patterns are solutions to software design problems that are presented in an almost conceptual way. That is to say, a given design pattern has the potential to be applied to a piece of software written in any number of languages but, at a code level, it’s up to the developer to interpret that idea and make it work for them.
Code fragmentation: The modern day goto
Keeping your code simple and easy to change is one of the hardest challenges when writing programs. One obvious aspect of this is the amount of code that you have to parse to understand what it aims to achieve.
Let your teams plan for themselves
As an industry of tinkerers, optimisers and perfectionists we occasionally miss the beauty of unorganisation and human instinct. Our obsession to be more efficient and productive can sometimes have some undesired consequences. At Made we often adapt our processes in the name of efficiency but lately we’ve started experimenting by taking away some of these processes with surprising results.
Planning is hard, can we do Kanban instead?
Planning is an activity that usually results in some emotional response, however it can generally be said that teams avoiding planning will also be avoiding thinking about the future in general. A lack of robust planning the detail in your organisation can bubble up to impact plans at the high level portfolio, causing serious consequences on Lead Time and Delivery Rate.
The Best and Worst Times To Pair Program
“Pair Programming” is two developers focussing on one task and taking turns to “drive” the development. Normally this means sitting down together and passing a keyboard back and forth in ten or fifteen minute intervals, but can also mean screen-sharing remotely.
The benefits of a pull request workflow
Note: Article edited on the 4/12/2018
Should I Build or Buy Software?
Often customers, or potential customers, will come to us with a pre-supposed view that they need to build a piece of software to solve their business need. We believe this is true only in a handful of cases.
Products not Projects
Traditionally, software is delivered as a project: a thing with a start and an end date, and probably a list of desired features. The software is (hopefully!) deemed complete by the end date, the project is closed, and the project team move on to their next project.
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