I had my head down this last week doing some code coaching and agile analysis work.  The thing that strikes me about many of our clients is that it is not sufficient to show people what they should be doing, one has to show people what they can do where they are now, as well as create a path to get to where they need to go.  It’s kind of like learning how to ride a horse properly while you are riding something else.

The complexities involved and tradeoffs needed are much greater.  A code pattern showed up that I’ve seen many times with teams transitioning to agile methods.  Not sure if this is written up anywhere else, but if so, someone please comment on it for me.

Here’s the problem.  Let’s say you have a lot of legacy code with lots of switches.  Instead of including this in the blog, I’ve written it up in our pattern repository here.

This kind of opens up the door to code debt reduction type patterns a la Working Effectively with Legacy Code.  I think this points to the challenge we have that many Agile books don’t speak to – we are not trying to adopt new practices from scratch, we are trying to transition to better practices while we are engaged in critical work.

Alan Shalloway
CEO, Net Objectives

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