Over the past few weeks, I’ve woken up.  Stepping back out of an IT Director role to being the Development Team Lead has helped me really get focused on where this team needs to go, thinking wise.  We have, to this point, developed some really great apps that help make this agency work.  But there’s so much more we need to do, and we have to get some thinking in place regarding how we do things.

Luckily, in our new IT Director, we have a man with MUCH experience and wisdom who is getting Project Management principles established, and that allows me to focus on how we can code going forward to ensure we are as effective as possible.  Of course, I’ve decided to look into Agile, and the best way to apply principles of iterative development to this ASP.NET team.  Luckily, I ran across a GREAT e-Book about ALT.NET and changing the way of thinking as an ASP.NET developer.  That e-Book is called Foundations of Programming, written by Karl Seguin (at http://www.codebetter.com).  I’ve read the first 20 pages so far, and I’ve assigned it to the team to read in order to create some thinking.  It definitely did that for me.

Having started my true development career in ASP.NET at Dell, I essentially ended up doing everything the MSDN way (as Karl puts it).  As a result, I broke nearly all the rules of classic development.  I’m having to rethink the way I’m doing things now, in order to make them what they should be.

So why Agile?  Why use Test Driven Development?  To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, “Agile and TDD are the worst forms of development except for all those others that have been tried.”  It’s funny how reading and working on the code in a different way has been really challenging to the status quo.  Along those lines, John Maxwell quoted Ronald Reagan in Developing The Leaders Around You, as saying, “Status quo, you know, that is Latin for the mess we’re in.” [emphasis added].  Well, we’ve not been in a real mess, but it could certainly be better.  So, we begin thinking in terms of iterations, not huge builds.  We begin thinking in terms of YAGNI (You Ain’t (hey, I’m in the S’th <—Mitch Hedberg reference, btw) Gonna Need It).  We begin thinking in terms of decoupling the code from the UI.  For real.  We start looking at ASP.NET MVC, and we start to really get it all of a sudden.

To my friend Jayme Davis, huge thanks for providing a little bit of information to help reassure me that I’m not losing my mind here.  He was a mentor at Dell, and has continued to be a great mentor ever since.

It feels good to be awake…