General
There are 9 entries for the tag
General
Our company is standardizing on VMWare for a number of reasons. I won’t list them here, but wanted to write about a problem that I had using VMWare Standalone Converter version 5.0 to convert Hyper-V virtual machines. There were four problems: The converter needs to be run as an administrator You have to be connected to localhost or you’ll be prompted to install the standalone agent first Domain credentials don’t work as expected You need to give explicit permissions to Everyone the directory where...
Sweet! I get to go to Build (formerly PDC) this year thanks to my awesome company Veracity Solutions. Secretly, I’m hoping that MS gives away Windows 8 tablets AND a mango edition windows phone. I went to Mix and got a Kinect. That was cool, but since I already had one . . . Technorati Tags: General...
An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow...
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,...
One of our users was having difficulties with their mac and using some web software. I decided to go peruse the landscape and see how much of a premium people were paying for their macs. I priced out a Dell and a Mac from their websites. I tried to get them as close to the same configuration, from a hardware standpoint, as I could. I found the following: Apple Macbook Pro Dell XPS 17 There are several important differences in the hardware: The mac doesn’t have a blueray player, but the dell does....
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!...
We installed Collabnet as our subversion server recently. This is the first time that we’ve used it. In general, it seems pretty good, but we ran into a problem with it. People were getting the following error in Tortoise: OPTIONS of ’https://xxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxx... SSL handshake failed: SSL error code – 1/1/336032856 (https://xxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxx) The odd thing is that for some people, it worked, for others, it didn’t! I also couldn’t find anything useful out on the internet. We had checked...
In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product. Note that I didn’t say about the product itself. Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners. Products only matter in relationship to their customers. If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product....
This is in response to a comment about my last post. I expected something revolutionary and significantly better than what was currently on the market. Microsoft consistently does this with other applications. Sql Server is, in my opinion, FAR superior to Oracle and MySql. .net kick’s Java’s behind. Visual Studio is so far ahead of the competition that using anything else is painful. For those of you that live and die by Eclipse, VS 2005 is clearly a superior product. The XBOX 360 is also much better...