Month: May 2019

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MacBook Pro?

I’ve been a Mac user for several years now. I have a MacBook Pro (2015) and a MacBook Air. I love them both. They are amazing machines. From battery live to performance and every aspect in between, Mac laptops are awesome. What makes the MacBook Pro so great for me is how well it’s positioned as a development machine. Lots of ram, high-quality graphics, fast, Linux compatible backend (BSD), and ports for everything I need. When I visit a client who wants to see what I’ve been working on, I connect a HDMI cable to my MacBook Pro and walk through the progress. If a customer asks me to add new photos to their website, I insert their SD card into my computer and grab the images. When I want to connect with a peripheral – such as a barcode scanner or a mouse – I use my USB. If I am working with Arduino, MicroBit, or a PyBoard, I connect a standard MicroUSB cable to my machine.

Time To Upgrade!

Now, after years on my current MacBook Pro, it’s time to upgrade. I need more hard drive space for all my projects, and I’d like more memory for using virtual machines. Of course, I want another MacBook Pro. Unfortunately the new machines seem far less developer friendly. Why? Because they ONLY have USB-C ports. No HDMI, no headphone jack, no Thunderbolt, no USB-A, no SD Card reader. If I want any of the above, I need to by a converter to connect to my USB-C port. So, when I go onsite, I will now need a laptop and a bag of spare cables to connect to what I need to use. What a horrible user experience! As a laptop user, my objective is to carry around as little as possible. Apple, why did you do this? Why did you destroy a machine that was excellent for development by removing all the ports that made it so useful?

What to Do?

I’ve been pondering for the last few weeks what to do. Do I buy the MacBook Pro along with all necessary accessories to achieve what I need, or do I buy a Windows laptop (for half the cost) that already contains all the things I want? Unfortunately, I like MacOS (specifically the command prompt and dev tools) too much to go back to Windows. So, I’m stuck paying top dollar for a machine that is severely lacking in its ability to perform many of the very things I buy a laptop to do.

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Agile Pricing?

Today, agile software development is the standard project management model. In many ways, it’s an excellent model. It allows for rapid changes to meet business needs, helps ensure quality throughout the process, and ensures that stakeholders have maximum visibility. But there’s one big problem…

How Do You Price Agile Projects?

Since Agile projects requirements are continually refined during the project, how do we know the amount of work to be done? How can we define a timeframe for development if we don’t have a clear picture of requirements? How can I tell you the cost when I don’t even know exactly what you want to do? Certainly I can provide an estimate based on the high-level definition of the project. But agile makes scope creep easy. New requirements can be added or old requirements removed. This means my best estimate may be wildly inaccurate.

How Can Developers Learn to Estimate Projects?

Making things more difficult, developers who have only ever worked in an agile environment will have difficulty estimating project workload. Why? Because they have never had to. Agile is so focused on the now that no attention is ever paid to the larger work of the project.

Future of Agile

The more agile work I do, the more I have mixed feelings about the process. While it allows greater management input throughout development, it suffers from a variety of problems. Sometimes, I even refer to it as (Fr)agile Development. This is just another issue to add to the list. My hope is that the software industry finds a better way to manage development that solves the problems with Agile while still providing all the positive aspects.

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