Steve Bargelt

Evaluating Agile / Scrum Project Applications

Yes I’ve been evaluating agile project tracking apps / solutions. Kind of painful to tell the truth. One major problem I have is that my team is not truly XP or Scrum – we are pretty agile but we do (for various regulatory purposes) insert non-agile principles into our processes. I often joke that we are more nimble than agile. I think our team does a serious kick-ass job with what we have to work it is sometimes hard to squeeze our process into a tool meant for XP or Scrum. The other problem is complexity of setup – quite a few packages are hosted (yuk) or require complex DB setups. All want to do is measure velocity and burn-down.

I’ve downloaded, played with or otherwise looked at:
http://danube.com/scrumworks
http://www.extremeplanner.com/
http://www.targetprocess.com/overview.asp
http://www.versionone.net/products.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=81daab54-6701-4fbc-b3d0-7f261383f371&DisplayLang=en
The MSFT solution is interesting… but requires Project so immediately I hate it. I did play with it during 6.0 and it seemed to work – but Project + Scrum – no thanks.

What really blows me away is the lack of “simple” tools. The agile manifesto even states “Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.” Which is often translated to “do the simplest thing that could possibly work” – which IMHO is (at least until we get Team Foundation Server!) is a simple spreadsheet in Excel (with a burn-down chart). With that in mind it seems that a google search for agile spreadsheet would yield a ton of results… but no all of the results are about developing spreadsheets using an agile methodology (huh? Ewww.)

 I have found one tool that I am planning on using for pour next release (http://www.scrumalliance.org/index.php/scrum_alliance/for_everyone/resources/tools/scrum_tools/scrum_tracking_spreadsheet_from_clay_ver_valen) that isn’t much different than the sheet I had created – except Clay is better with Excel than I am so I like his better!

ScrumWorks also seems promising but the learning curve is more than I want to deal with. I may use it in parallel with Clay’s spreadsheet(s) on our next release in hopes of “getting it” for our next release. By the way – hey Danube – if you are listening – I downloaded your tool months ago but was turned off by the fact that Scrumworks would not install into my Program Files directory structure since it contains a space. Listen guys – “Program Files” has contained a space since 1995. That’s 11 years. It scared me the first time I went to install your app so I cancelled out of setup and deleted the download. It was only on the insistence of a long-time friend that I finally decided that I’d let it slide.

posted @ Thursday, May 18, 2006 5:20 PM | Feedback (4) |

How to create Framework 1.1 assembly using VS2005

[from this post: How to create Framework 1.1 assembly using VS2005]

I was wondering for some time if its possible to create vs2003 (framework 1.1) assembly using vs2005 as i would love the option to still be able to produce fw 1.1 code mainly for supportability while using the vs2005 IDE which has such great improvements…. Class Diagram… Generate unit Tests etc…
Jomo Fisher published on his blog the 9 steps of enabling fw 1.1 build on vs 2005 … and ITS WORKING !
1. Copy the content of this blog post (MSBuild targets file) to “C:\program files\msbuild\” and name it “CrossCompile.CSharp.targets”
2. Create a new C# console project (I’m working currently on directions for winforms app)
3. Use notepad to edit MyApp.csproj. Replace the entire tag with

4. When prompted, reload the project. You’ll have to answer a security dialog :
choose Load Project Normally
5. In VS, click the drop-down that says ‘Any CPU’ and select ‘Configuration Manager’
6. Under Active Solution Platform, select
7. Select ‘.NET 1.1’ and press OK.
8. Build and notice error about System.Collections.Generic. This means its working because generics aren’t supported in 1.1.
9. Open Program.cs and delete the line: using System.Collections.Generic; And rebuild.
Because winform apps in vs 2005 uses partial classes the easiest way to create a new win form app in 2005 that is compatible to 2003 is to create a winform app in 2003 then open it in 2005 (it will be converted to 2005) and follow the above step to build it using fw 1.1
Note: you wont be able to use the new vs2005 controls on vs2003 app as the framework 1.1 will not know how to deal with them so when ever you’ll try compiling forms with such controls you’ll get a compile time error.

posted @ Thursday, May 18, 2006 5:03 PM | Feedback (1) |

A Metric Leading to Agility

[from this post: A Metric Leading to Agility]

Nearly every metric can be perverted, since up- and down-ticks in the metric can come from good or bad causes. Teams driven by metrics often game the metrics rather than deliver useful software. Ask the team to deliver and measure Running Tested Features, week in and week out, over the course of the entire project. Keeping this single metric looking good demands that a team become both agile and productive.

posted @ Thursday, May 18, 2006 5:03 PM | Feedback (0) |

ChubClub 2006: Week 20

263.4 pounds with 22.9 body fat. Short post this week - but at least it is a post!

Training

• Weights: Saturday & Tuesday. Had to coach baseball Monday and Wednesday nights.
• Cardio: Monday and Wednesday 45 minutes on the treadmill. Watching “The Shield” while I workout.

Food

Been good all week with the exception of Sunday – Mother’s Day. I BBQ’d up some baby-backs and damn they were good. Of course Brenda made a compel fabulous deserts and of course I had to partake. All-in-all though I feel good about Sunday – I could have totally shoved my face full – instead I used my head and ate reasonably.

Stats

Today (5/18/06) 263.4, 22.9% BF
Started (1/1/06) 271, 25.3 BF%

Here are the charts for 2006 (click for larger versions):

posted @ Thursday, May 18, 2006 5:02 PM | Feedback (1) |

SourceForge.net: FAT Acceptance Testing Framework

[from this SourceForge Project: SourceForge.net: FAT Acceptance Testing Framework]

FAT is a functional acceptance testing framework for .NET applications. It enables a customer to specify acceptance criteria using an extensible requirements language. Provides out-of-the-box support for testing web applications.

posted @ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 4:49 PM | Feedback (0) |

Joel at the 'Dojo : Automatically Adding Projects To CruiseControl.NET

[from this post: Joel at the 'Dojo : Automatically Adding Projects To CruiseControl.NET]

Automatically Adding Projects To CruiseControl.NET
I recently set up a build server for my personal projects that includes CruiseControl.Net, Vault, and Dragnet. I'll be putting my blogging tool on there, as well as a few other things I have been putting together.
Anyway, one of the pains of setting up a continuous integration server is adding new projects. Most of the time, I have to TS into the server and change the ccnet.config file to include the new project and I usually end up leaving the file checked out on the build server, and never check it in. That means I never get the latest version under source control. I know - I should just check it in, but I don't.
I also don't typically have a nice editor on my build server to manage the editing of the config file. Notepad is nice, but VS.Net is better! So, my idea was to create a project in CruiseControl.NET that would monitor the ccnet.config file, and reload it if the file changes. Thus, I can change how a project is watched, add projects, or remove projects.
First, I configured CCNet to use a ccnet.config file in my source control tool. I put it in the $/BuildProcess folder. The first project I added was my build process project. It watches the $/BuildProcess folder and when something is changed, it calls my build file. Here's the build file contents:


Basically, all I do is get the latest version of the ccnet.config file. The CCService reloads this file and you have any updates you added, so if you add a project, you can have it start being monitored remotely!
One word of caution: If you screw up the config file, you're done. You'll have to go onto the build server and fix the problem there, since CruiseControl.NET can't load it's config file.

posted @ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:57 PM | Feedback (0) |

Quiet Period

Yeah - it has been quiet around here for about a month! I had forgotten how much time a baby takes up - yeah basically all of it. Throw in the fact that I'm coaching Derek's baseball team and I have no free time!

posted @ Tuesday, May 02, 2006 10:36 AM | Feedback (0) |

Deity?

I originally posted this on my Yahoo 360 blog almost a year ago  - but since I never use that blog so I thought I would repost here:

Some of you may have noticed that I use deitySteve as a signature or that one or two of my email address are deitySteve at wherever dot com. I’m here to explain the origins of that handle. I’m sure many of you look at deitySteve, snicker and think to yourselves “that guy is no God… what is he thinking?”

Well not so long ago in an alternate reality dubbed the Internet Boom three young friends started a web development company they called WebDeities. Clever name, eh. Here’s a little secret. The three guys really liked the name DigitalSherpas (at the time they were a big web development firm in Seattle responsible for among other things the Seattle Mariner’s website). So they started playing with other words… you can see probably see that after a few beers DigitalSherpas morphed into WebDeities. Oh yeah and to top it off webdeities.com was available!

So how does this relate to deitySteve? Simple really. The founders became deityErick, deityJerry and deitySteve. It turns out that on most sites (Y!, gmail, hotmail etc.) deitysteve was not taken – so it has stuck. So no huge ego involved - I swear. Next episode, the story of my Xbox gamertag (Deity)!

posted @ Tuesday, May 02, 2006 10:32 AM | Feedback (3) |