When I was around 16 years old I had a job in a bicycle storage at a railroad station. This job paid very well for a young guy and you mainly had to sell tickets so people could store their bikes for the night.

There is nothing like unclear or poorly described requirements – or more generally speaking wrong input – to put undue pressure on the output of a development team. Agile processes often result in amazingly productive software machines, but bad input is like throwing sand in that machine.

About regex, matching glue lines, dashboards and specification of duration: During the last @codecentric_nl DevThursday we had the chance to add some great new functionality to the Gareth framework. From now on you will be able to use regular expressions (and re-use code for different experiments) and we made it easier and more flexible to specify the duration of experiments.

There is always a reason for making software. Let’s rephrase that: there should always be a reason, at least from a business perspective. How else could our products have any impact?

Hello world, please meet Gareth. He can be seriously unpleasant. Trust me, we know. But he is becoming more and more indispensable. He will tell you clearly, without emotions, when your ideas are rubbish. He will certainly not hold back and he will give you the facts when your assumptions don’t hold up. He will keep validating that your business goals are reached. If not, he’ll let you know.

Software development evolves at a rapid pace. Continuous delivery is the new black. With software being created and delivered faster than ever, we find that the input lags behind. We build software with a reason, usually to solve an existing problem or deliver more business value. Yet we notice that these reasons are hardly ever validated.

It’s a funny thing to say that delivering business value is the most important thing when developing software. It doesn’t matter that a framework like Scrum is far from efficient, because we focus on value. We deliver business value. Working software. Every sprint. Period.

The thing about trends is that they will come and they will go. So after the agile trend continuous delivery and devops are in line. I think in a way it is very nice to see that development craftsmanship practices are becoming more and more accepted. We can all benefit from this. Software is eating the world so let’s be damn sure that the software is good. But is it?