Furthering the quest to *get* agile

April 15th, 2009 • 1 comment Productivity, Uncategorized, agile, programming
Tags: linkedin

My academic learning focus has been a bit off recently, what with the amount of work i’ve had on. But, no excuses – my quest to grasp the academic history of agile delivery is taking steps forward, with my digging into DSDM. I’ve decided to focus on DSDM due to its UK-centricity, which I feel will have the greatest short term impact. I’ll get to SCRUM, XP, RUP, et al when i get to them.

I started the quest ages ago and have progressed it, but more in practice than in reading. Now’s the time for the reading to pick up again…

Now we’re rocking! DSL story driven development and testing in Java!

December 9th, 2008 • 1 comment Business, Internet, Java, Productivity, Ruby, agile, software development
Tags: linkedin

At TechnoPhobia, we have an interesting challenge to implement a technology agnostic requirements capture process that (in my mind) will enable us, with very minimal effort, to repurpose these documented requirements into fully automated browser tests. I’m thinking that the process could look something like this:

1. The project and client team write end-user functional requirements as User Stories and Scenarios
2. The stories are stored as plain text in SVN or GIT and made immediately available to the development and test teams
3. The development and test teams create a few executable padder files, wrapped around these stories, turning them into fully automatable browser tests
4. The executable files are run, they read the stories and interact with the browser to determine if the stories successfully pass

Pretty cool, huh! No more massive team specific documents, just good old plain textual stories that are shared by all on the project, including the client.

Making this happen across multiple technologies

• In Ruby, we’ve already used this parts of this approach on a live project using Cucumber (formally RSpec story runner). It worked pretty well. 
• In Java, easyb seems to be the a good forward. Here’s a little more about using easyb

I am WAY TOO EXCITED to see an implementation in Java! This opens massive opportunity to progress with a technology agnostic approach. Now to find a suitable solution for .Net and perhaps PHP

Omnifocus – getting more beautiful by the day

December 2nd, 2008 • Productivity, gtd, iPhone, organisation
Tags: linkedin

I have many notes on my use of OmniFocus on mac and iPhone to GTD but none quite ready to post. But, if you your’re not Getting Things Done or are on a mac and are not using OmniFocus, perhaps you should! It’s lovely!

Dave Thomas: Security as a measure of effectiveness

October 26th, 2008 • 1 comment Business, Productivity, agile, gtd, software development
Tags: linkedin

I really like this approach – Assess the state of security within a development team and project as an indication of how well a project is going and how effective processes are working out.

It’s another one of those many obvious tests that we all do, but at times i’ve certainly found myself accepting insecurity within a project team as one of those things because the team are new to the pressures or software projects are always uncertain and as such stressful. With a little consideration, it’s clearly more useful to use perceptions of insecurity as more direct indications that change is required.

What might we be looking for? A few possible ideas:

• How secure are the developers about the quality and stability of their code?
• How secure are the developers about rolling code to the various hosting platforms?
• How secure are team members about their relationship with others on the team?
• How secure is the project manager about hitting the deadline?
• How secure is the account manager about conversations with the client?
• How secure are senior management about project and team performance?

The overall intention of improving security is to make everyone feel relaxed. Software development is meant to be fun after all!

Source: Agile Toolkit Podcast ‘No fluff just stuff 2006 tour’

Jason Calacanis – work hard and succeed. don’t and fail

October 15th, 2008 • Business, Productivity, software development, work/life balance
Tags: linkedin

A blunt and no-nonsense approach: Watch the video on Work/Life Balance and Blood Sweat and Tears

37Signals don’t like his style, but in person i very much got where he was coming from – work hard and succeed! As it happens, I’m not working at his pace currently as it’s time for a family life (well, as well as working hard, just not 6-7 days a week like i have in the past), but what he says about people not pulling their weight rings too many bells!

Calacanis has more advice on “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)“ here