Dan North - Agile Troublemaker, Developer, Originator of BDD

Some teams are orders of magnitude more effective than others. Kent Beck famously described himself as "not a great programmer, but a good programmer with great habits".

### Patterns of Effective Delivery

- If someone can't tell you where something doesn't apply, they don't understand it yet. Or they are selling you something.
- Patterns are for naming things that you see.
- Best Practices are for beginners. Patterns for advanced people.

### Spike and Stabilize

- A Spike is an experiment - timeboxed; it will be thrown away
- A Spike is like an "option" in the financial world. It gives us a right, but not an obligation.
- Test Driven Testing

### Hair Trigger

- The Ability of a team to deploy its own code
- This means the team can go quickly and it can also screw up quickly.
- If there is a requirement for multiple people to review the code that settles some of the legal issues this might create.

### Ginger Cake

- Ginger Cake: Like chocolate cake just with ginger.
- Copy-paste code to get start quickly. From code you know really well.
- Structured Ginger cake
- Behavioral Ginger cake
- Ginger cake is the opposite of DRY
- The dark side of DRY is coupling

### Shallow Silos

- Silos are bad, cross-functional teams are good. No, there is spectrum.
- Small sub-teams with common stand-ups

### Burn the Ships

- Burn the Ships: Force your people to move forward by eliminating the way back.
- Set specific goals with specific dead-lines.

For a paradigm shift (e.g. moving to agile) you need 3 things:

- dead-line
- no other options (can't back out)
- information

Software, Faster - the book