I was interviewed by Bill Venners for his artima.com web site. In the interview I touch upon refactoring, evolutionary design, flexibility, and test driven development. Bill even manages to make me sound coherent.

You can use metadata based approaches to remove the pain from tedious data oriented tasks.

Jim and Alexei took a leading role in developing a new version of NUnit. From this they reflected on how design is affected by the new .NET language feature of attributes.

At the end of May 2002, the XP community once again descended on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. In this article I look at the plenary speeches from Ken Schwaber, David Parnas, Enrico Zaninotto, Bill Wake, and the Standish Group's Jim Johnson. They lead me into some thoughts on the essence of agile development, the role of mathematical specifications, the complexity of irreversibility, metaphor, and the best way to drastically cut software costs.

This article is based on a talk I gave at LOMA, an insurance industry conference, in 2001. In it I examine a few software development projects that Thoughtworks has done which are, to some degree “enterprise transforming”. The talk (and paper) are aimed at a non-technical audience. From the projects I draw out some common lessons learned. In essence these are: Deliver Frequently, Expect Surprises, Get High Level Executive Support, Treat Business and Software Development as Partners, Choose Technology for the Future, People are The Critical Success Factor, and Keep Learning. A version of this article was recently published in Resource magazine.

The Continuous Integration principles are applicable in many different development environments. While the principles remain largely unchanged from project to project, the implementation of this practice can vary considerably. Variables such as language, platform, team size & team location provide unique implementation challenges. Here we will outline how we've implemented CI in a COM/Windows environment for a project developing primarily in Visual C++.

It always surprises me that many well-established principles about performance optimization aren't very well known. This article is yet another attempt to cover these.

Many modern languages make a distinction between public and private features in a module. A distinction that doesn't get made so often is between public and published features: and that may be a more important distinction.

The kinds of model you draw depends on the purpose that you want to put them to. John describes a useful distinction between conceptual, specification, and implementation models.