About
Me and the boys
I’m Paddy Healey, a journeyman software developer with over 20 years experience in the IT industry. I’ve worked in many roles in IT, from a glorified tape loader on ICL mainframes, through technical trainer, consultant and developer. Over the years I’ve worked with many businesses in many different industries, on many software platforms and I have never lost my passion for solving business problems.
Today I work for Ext.IT as a consultant and mentor, with a particular responsibility for improving processes and practices. You can hire me by sending an email to paddy@practicalagility.com or info.us@ext-it.com
In terms of what I intend for this website, I’ve always been interested in what works and what doesn’t in different software development methodologies and practices.
I believe that a the following statements are true about the state of software development today:
- “One-size-fits-all” approaches often do not work, as these approaches are often adopted through dogma, rather than pragmatism and regard for the specific situation.
- Software development is still a new industry and what we consider best practice today will be quickly superseded, so whatever approaches we take should be flexible.
Many people assume that adopting agile practices means that you either have to be incredibly technical, or have to adopt massive amounts of new processes to be successful.
While it is true that if you don’t embrace change and enter into agile in the right spirit, you will not succeed, you will find that once you try them the developer practices actually help you to grow into a more professional programmer. Agile processes are lightweight but effective, with inbuilt feedback loops to make them self improving.
With this website, I’ll be blogging about and linking to articles that show you how to be better at software. If there are practices that haven’t worked for me, I’ll tell you about those too. I also intend to build a recommended reading list for you, so that if you are getting started with agile, or are curious as to what it’s all about, you’ll be able to find out here.
That is the philosophy behind the website.
Enjoy, and don’t forget to follow me on twitter!
