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Martin Fowler and Dan North Point Out a Yawning Crevasse of Doom

Posted by Martin Fowler & Dan North on Aug 13, 2008 04:11 AM

Community
Agile
Topics
Collaboration ,
Communication
Tags
Ubiquitous Language ,
QCon ,
Feedback ,
Qcon London 2007 ,
Domain Driven Design ,
DSLs
Summary
In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2007, Martin Fowler and Dan North talk about the communication gap existing between the developers and the customers or users. Closing this gap is extremely important in order to create successful software.

Bio
Martin Fowler is one of our industry's most well known thought leaders having had an influence in the adoption of OO, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, UML, and XP. Dan North is a principal consultant with ThoughtWorks, where he writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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  • This article is part of a featured topic series on Collaboration

3 comments

Reply

Great presentation! by Stephen Cresswell Posted Aug 13, 2008 9:44 AM
Partly Disagree by Ashwanth Fernando Posted Aug 14, 2008 1:02 PM
Re: Partly Disagree. by Ashwanth Fernando Posted Aug 14, 2008 9:55 PM
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    Great presentation!

    Aug 13, 2008 9:44 AM by Stephen Cresswell

    Shame it's cut short by (what I assume to be) a few minutes

    Reply

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    Partly Disagree

    Aug 14, 2008 1:02 PM by Ashwanth Fernando

    I think I would not go as far as to say that the BA (Business Analyst) does not need to be the middle man in software projects. The set of tasks that developers need to do , every day become increasingly bigger and bigger - Architecting, Design, Coding, Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Memory Profiling, Learning on new technologies, Versioning, etc. etc. This makes them impossible to remove the ferry man and create a direct bridge between the business and developers. A techno functional BA must be present to write the requirements documents and translate between jargons, so that developers can atleast go home by 12.00 Midnight. You see, if developers come to work cursing, because they are not getting enough work-life balance, that is not a good thing either.

    However, there has to be workshops on a regular basis (perhaps every couple of weeks) between the developers and the business so that the developers get a feel of what the business really wants out of a project.

    On other days, the ferry man's duty is translation, adding functional ideas to the business folks and giving them to the developers, so that developers concentrate on their core activities.

    Reply

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    Re: Partly Disagree.

    Aug 14, 2008 9:55 PM by Ashwanth Fernando

    But one thing that I like, is Martin Fowler's way of presenting concepts, either in his books or at a talk. Simply phenomenal!! I used to like Josh Bloch's presentation skills. Martin Fowler is just as good, if not better.

    Keep it up Martin!

    Reply

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