An important point to consider.

Part 1: Collectively clarify what happens on projects now (on projects that do not use stories)

It was a highly interactive session and i first asked attendees to collectively draw on a whiteboard the project process as they saw it, with all of the project’s actors, products and interactions.

What was drawn resembled a kind of mashup of a UML activity diagram with swim lanes & a gantt chart. It showed what the individual actors in the process did and when, and who fed into who in the process.

Part 2: Clarify what documents are written and the associated risks and costs

When the whiteboard was complete, I asked the attendees to consider a number of things:

1. At what points during the process are documents produced and by who?
2. Of those documents produced, which are directly focused on the business and user requirements?
3. Of the many producers of those documents, which of these producers had their focus on the business and user requirements?
4. Of the many documents produced, which were open to interpretation and translation?
5. What are the perceived risks of having so many documents and periods of documentation translation?

When this work was complete, a few points became clear to the group:

1. The project team, as defined on the whiteboard, was greatly separated into areas of expertise and each was concerned about their area of expertise
2. Interactions between actors were mostly through written documents
3. Few actors following this project process retained a direct focus on the business and end user requirements
4. A lot of documentation was being written and much of it was being duplicated, at times to protect actors within the process
5. Vast amounts of document interpretation and translation was going on to produce each document

Part 3: Consider stories

After this part of the session was complete, i gave some examples of the wonderfully simple story DSL and then suggested that many of these documents could be replaced by stories and scenarios:

1. I explained that stories can be used to clarify both high-level requirements and detailed solution definitions. I described how stories can be expanded through the use of scenarios.
2. I described how everyone on the project, including the client, can understand the wonderfully simple DSL and contribute to the bank of stories.
3. I then came in with the ace Stories can be used to drive automated browser tests! Man, they fell off their seats at the point!

It was an awesome session. A lot was discussed and understood.

My intention is to have the Rails app on a separate server from the Hudson server and have the Rails app return Hudson-friendly XML from RSpec and Cucumber tests. When i get this to work, it’ll enable me to roll this out at work, with a central Hudson server (perhaps) that interacts with multiple app servers of various technologies and, along with the wonders of Sonar, gives a view into code test coverage, pass rate and complexity. I feel that i might struggle convincing Sonar to play with Ruby, but we’ll see.

Why Hudson?

To be completely honest, at work, i didn’t make that decision and am yet to chase down exactly why it was chosen over CruiseControl, but I completely trust those that made the decision on their project. I’m a big believer in standardising and am as such following suit and trying out Hudson.

One warning – accessibility not out of the box

Liferay’s out of the box portlets are not accessible! It’s a known issue and Liferay want the community to support them in fixing this. Seems like a reasonable request and it’s lack of focus on accessibility stems most likely out it’s origins in USA. They care less than the brits about this stuff!

Tutorials

I’ll post tutorials as i progress through my Ruby portlet development and integration.

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…

What is a DSL?

It got me all excited so i’ve started (slowly, i’ll admit) to write my own DSL in Ruby. I’ll post how i get on.

This relates to a post i made about security as a sense of stability at work.

My rough summary: Enjoy your work, feel secure, or make a change! Don’t accept any less!

It’s only a draft, but it’s a start. More to follow…

I’m not giving up yet, but it’s not top on my list of ways to keep in touch.

However, if had twitter groups that enabled me to find people by topic rather than contact details (like i can do in facebook), then it’d be awesome. For now, i’ll continue using Facebook groups.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/objectivecprimer.action;jsessionid=EBE50C6510FD05380290B42E0C4E8EC6.worker10

I’ll add comments as i get through this primer.