Links that made me think

Here's a roundup of the posts that made me think the most last week in the blogosphere and that deserve to be recommended. I also wrote a brief summary of the topic they talk about to give them a context.
I reserve some time every day to evaluate my Google Reader entries from an hundred feeds, and I think the ones I have listed here are very interesting readings. Do you use a feed aggregator? Do you find quality links in it?
I hope these authors feel appreciated for their good work.

Getting started with Scrum: a panoramic on this agile methodology, even if towards the end it digresses in marketing. If you want a brief introduction to agile estimating and planning this is a must read and there are links to explanation of terms like backlog, stories, etc.. though, there is no need for full-featured project management applications if you just want to give a shot to agile. Just organize the process with plain text files under version control instead.


Coding Simplicity: How to avoid feature creep in your life is an interesting parallel between life and programming. In both software development and personal development we should think before pulling in new features and activities: they may cost more than the value they provide, and your life it's not a toy project you can throw away.

Your company is insane because what they wish is that you could somehow get all the benefits of Agile without making any difficult or scary changes. We fight for unit testing, agile estimates and continuos integration every day, while people say "It's a waste of time, I just want to get it done". This post is inspiring and shows the reality: you cannot think that reading a book and attending a seminar will make you an agile programmer or a good unit tester instantly. There is managerial and personal work that has to be done before becoming gurus.

Design for testability talk is a one-hour video of a Google Tech Talk where Misko Hevery (Agile coach at Google) explains the pillars of designing an object-oriented application to allow ease of testing. The key concept is there is no silver bullet (also known as testing magic) in the testing world, that can be applied after classes are already coded. Testability must be included in the design and, not surprisingly, it improves its quality by forcing high decoupling.

A more practical link for Php developers: "Micro" Optimizations that matter where Brandon Savage points out the real techniques that cost nearly nothing in time and money, and can vastly improve a php application's performance. If your profiling result says that you need to speed up a large number of things, try Apc for example before refactoring and eliminate your framework because of its overhead. Often Apc cuts the time for displaying a page in half, without making any changes to your code.

Let me know if you have read other interesting articles on software development and engineering recently. Feel free to add similar links in the comments.