Chuck Charbeneau

In the early days of Agile Software Development, agile was actually an adjective. Agile Software Development was a complete thought and process, and it focused on the process by which software was created by dedicated software developers. Extreme Programming (XP) was the norm and it was understood that good development practices created quality software. Unfortunately, although many XP practices can be found in scrum, not since the heyday of XP have they been a focus.

Over the years, as scrum …

The folks at lifehacker asked a simple question on their site the other day "Programmers: What Does It Take to Be a Developer (Other than Coding)?". I love questions like this as it takes the conversation away from the religious wars of language syntax and looks at the other, important facets that make a good developer. My focus on teaching and improving ALM and Agile methodologies on dev teams has me asking this question quite often. To find the answers for a specific team, I tend to break …

About a year ago I started a series of posts on becoming a software developer to coincide with the Code.Org "Hour of Code". This post is the fifth post in the series focusing on the skills, patterns and practices involved in being a developer. If you haven't yet, please go back and read through the preceding posts for better understanding of where this post is coming from.

Part 1 - On Software, Getting Started and Staying Relevant

Part 2 - On Software, Stacks and Technologies …

If you want to support your agile activities with deep thinking and process guidance, I suggest you start at the top and work your way down this list.

I added the third category because good agile practices and software craftsmanship go hand in hand. Please read the craftsmanship books as soon as you can if you are writing code or supporting / managing those that do.

Finally, I am Microsoft leaning in my career, if you aren't, you can skip the TFS/Visual Studio centric titles.

Scrum and …

It's been nearly two weeks, and you have been diligently making your way through the various tutorials, on line content and examples listed in my previous two articles. And you've written a bunch of code and you're pretty excited and you have absolutely NO idea what to do next.

Just about everything about us is on line. It is shared between platforms controlled by Facebook, twitter, tumblr, and instagram. The thing that these things don't give you is control. You are not their customer, you …

So now what? You've run through all of the Code Academy tutorials, enjoyed being able to build your own dynamic web pages and want to know how to write your own, robust web sites; to maybe head off on your own and help mom with her church mailing list or Bobby's soccer team track their schedule on line. You are wondering how to manage data, dynamically and conditionally generate HTML and are really confused as to what tools you should be using to write this code on your own machine and make it …

Development Environment

First things first, you'll want something other than notepad in which to write code. Microsoft provides several options for the would be .NET developer, including a free development environment called Visual Studio Express and a more robust (for pay) environment, Visual Studio, which students can actually download for free.

Unlike PHP, Python and Perl, .NET languages (C#, VB.NET and F#) are compiled languages like C++ and Java which requires a couple of other tools be …