Development
There are 24 entries for the tag
Development
We’ve used dbdeploy.net on a number of projects and have found it to be a useful tool, especially around CI environments. We recently started a Windows Azure project that uses SQL Server and discovered that DbDeploy.Net didn’t work. There have been a few nagging issues with DbDeploy.Net as well, like the lack of support for recursive script directories, and when we looked into the code base, we discovered that it’s not really written to modern software development standards, and that getting it there...
In the New Testament in Luke 4:23 Jesus speaks of a proverb, “Physician, Heal Thyself.” What, you may ask, does this have to do with being a good developer or a good ScrumMaster? In my experience, it has quite a bit to do with it, actually, and recently, it’s had far more meaning to me than it used to have in the past. In large part, my own increased awareness has stemmed from reading Lyssa Adkins fantastic book, “Coaching Agile Teams.” My Command and Control Roots My dad owns several independent...
Is technical talent more important than Team Dynamic? I don’t think so. Read on and tell me if you agree. The Art of the Interview For my job, I conduct quite a few technical interviews. Rarely will I have a week go by where I’m not digging into someone’s brain trying to find out what they know and how they think. However, understanding their technical knowledge is only part of the challenge. We also must understand whether or not they code quickly, and whether or not they they will be a good fit...
Recently, I gave a presentation on Flow at Agile Executives. It was a fun meeting and a fun topic and lead to several realizations on my part. First, when Alistair Cockburn is in the audience, I get a bit nervous. Second, Lean and Agile aren’t incompatible, they’re complimentary. Let me explain. The Sterility of Lean Lean tends to think of people as nothing more than metrics. Cogs in the grand scheme of things. Little focus is placed on the human aspect of software development when talking about...
You’ve all seen this team, maybe you’ve even been on this team. I certainly know that I have! What kind of team, you might ask? It’s the team that is simply dysfunctional. Many reasons can exist for a team that isn’t working, and team dysfunction is a complex thing that can’t necessarily be isolated into a simple formula that will always work to make people function well on a team. Cynefin Recently, I attended RallyOn in Boulder with Rally Software Development. This was one of the best user conferences...
He who fails to plan, plans to fail. – unknown In many ways, one of the most dreaded tasks of every iteration is the Sprint Planning Meeting. This meeting is a very important meeting, but many, many things can go wrong and make this meeting a very long and very painful experience. However, this meeting is critical to the success of the team. If the team doesn’t know what they’re doing at the beginning of the iteration, how can they commit to getting the work done? To hopefully help ease the pain...
Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However,...
A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization. Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company. This is unfortunate. Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner!...
Your Team Needs You The introduction of Agile into a corporation has many impacts on the team, and many impacts to the executives leading those teams. In my experience, many Agile projects fail, not because the team did their best, but because the executives that should have been supporting the team failed to do so. This lack of support can be manifested in many ways. I’ve seen executives fail by doing the following: Failure to help with the prioritization process Failure to pay attention to the...
Good Product Owners will help the team be the best that they can be. Bad product owners will mess with the team and won’t care about the team. If you’re a product owner, seek to do good and avoid bad behavior at all costs. Remember, this is for YOUR benefit and you have much power given to you. Use that power wisely. Scope Creep The product owner has several tools at his disposal to inject scope into an iteration. First, the product owner can use defects to inject scope. To do this, they’ll tell...
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult. All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner. Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities. I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers...
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. I’ve often heard similar phrases around Scrum that clue me in to someone who doesn’t understand Scrum. The phrases go something like this: “We don’t do Agile because the idea of letting people just do whatever they want is wrong. We believe in a more structured approach.” (i.e. Work is Prison, and I’m the Warden!) “I love Agile. Agile lets us do whatever we want!” (Cowboy Agile?) “We’re Agile, but we use a process...
For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all. It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005. I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it. I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t. I still didn’t understand the concept of a team. I still wanted to tell the team...
I’m going to write my history with Agile here. That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read. Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews. I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early...
Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted. I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example. A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible. As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They...
So we're having a terminology discussion with co-workers of mine. The word, "Screen" comes up, and one of my co-workers says, "It's not a screen! That's the thing you look at. It's a form!" Instant response from another co-worker, who has a gift for this kinda thing: "You're using a program called Windows and you can't see through it, so what the hell!" Technorati Tags: Humor,Development...
I'm at PDC, and glad I am as well. First, I need to thank the geeks with blogs people for the AWESOME t-shirt. Well done. The site looks great. Second, this whole cloud thing that you're reading about, if you're not here, is pretty cool. I agree with MS, this will be the big thing of the future. I just wish we knew what they were thinking for cost. Microsoft Azure will be a big deal. They've spent over two years of development on it, torn apart SQL server to make it happen, and are running some of...
I've experienced this before, and all you can do is cry. This is why agile is so important. Instead of one person making all of the decisions, you have a team that makes the decisions. The "manager" tends to fall into just a product owner role, which is a good thing. In a team situation, the intern would have had a chance to put out his ideas as to a solution. In agile, they would have been in two to four week intervals, so rather than a 5 month development period, the stakeholders (i.e. the boss)...
I received this in e-mail today: We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website...
Well, we've gone and done it. We're no longer using Nettiers. It was good while we were, but the overhead of it eventually became way too much, and since we were doing mostly generic CRUD operations, it no longer made sense. Instead, we're going to write a custom DAL. Here's why: We're working with a LARGE database with some pretty complex data structures, which required quite a bit of customization of Nettiers to make it understand the structures. The knowntypes enumeration in WCF was killing us....
Technorati Tags: Vista,games,NVidia,drivers I have two machines, one is my laptop that I use for WPF development and other development work. It runs Vista and I can't say that I've ever had a problem with it, except when running games. I like a lot of new features of Vista and recommend it to people regularly. My other machine is strictly a gaming machine and today I'm removing Vista from it. Why? Not because of some arcane reason, but because the Nvidia drivers for non-8000 series video cards are...
Does open source really work? I’m skeptical. A perfect example is the open source project NDoc. I’ve seen this with more than one project. A project goes open source by a company, supposedly to accept outside contributors, but few open source projects have contributors outside of those that started the project. At best, most successful open source projects only have a handful of contributors and are dependent upon large corporations funding development work on the project. Here’s my take on why:...
I hear quite a bit about Agile development methodologies and their use in business, but I'm beginning to wonder if anyone REALLY does Agile development. When I was CIO, we "sort-of" did agile development, that is we tried to enforce it, but because interference from on high, we typically had problems with iterations. The CEO didn't get Agile and was constantly saying things like, "Right, but can't we just insert a little time in the process for working on stuff that Marketing comes up with during...
In a story on News.com, Novell and Microsoft are apparently going to work together for supporting Suse linux and Longhorn. Very interesting. In my opinion, this is huge. I can only hope that they also collaborate on Mono as well so that we can do .net development for linux and get .net 2.0 on linux. 1.1. is there, but 2.0 is still not quite ready. This should have Red Hat people up at nights...