Looking at the new iMacs the 27" quad-core looks like it would make a superb pairing station for programming. I've been waiting to see what the update looked like before looking at end of year purchases. Here's how I see it:

Thoughts about testing in an agile environment.

Thoughts about testing in agile projects. What are the effects of acceptance test driven development and behavior driven development?

MeasureAgile Coaches and Consultants frequently warn their clients that traditional measures such as Earned Value, Hours Worked, Lines of Code, Code Coverage for Tests are not well suited to Agile Projects. But then our clients are left with the question what are good Agile Metrics? How would I tell a good metric from a bad one? Are there contexts where a good metric is bad?

None of the agile processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry. As Alistair Cockburn once told me, “Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process.”

The current problem is that hiring an agile consultant to be on-site and work with the team for a number of weeks or months is prohibitively expensive. But this is exactly what is needed to help impart Agile knowledge from person to person.

Presentation on the advantages and disadvantages of Mercurial (a distributed version control system) over centralized version control tools like subversion. Goes into some detail in the concepts of how Mercurial works and a conceptual model that will help people understand how branching/merging in mercurial works.