Archives
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New Article: Agile: Story Completion Problems
I've posted a new article on some issues we had with story completion and steps we took to resolve them.
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Agile: Story Completion Problems
On a recent project we ran into an interesting problem – or rather we ran into it at the end of every iteration and especially the end of each release. The essence of the problem was the stories were “done” but the customer had not signed off on them. In non-agile shops the mantra “QA has it” is heard for the same symptom, in fact our morning stand-ups were starting to have the same flavor. For this project there are 2-3 developers for each tester and our current immature state of acceptance test automation means a full regression of our primary product takes about 1 week including automated, manual and some ad hoc testing.
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Going the Extra Mile – Why Bother?
Having recently been involved with a team that was being exhorted to “step up” and “go the extra mile” I noticed a range of responses from “lets go” to “why bother” to “I don’t think so”. After thinking about the response I identified several personal factors:
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Why We Love Lazy Programmers
At one time our build and deploy process was full of manual steps and could take 1-2 days to put a build into the QA and Dev environments. Using tools like nAnt we improved the build and deploy time to 1-2 hours with most of the automation on the build side. Later one developer got tired of manually deploying and created some deploy scripts. Now deployment to any of the 5 environments (development, testing, staging, demo, production) is a single command line taking 1-10 minutes depending on whether a full build is required or not.
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Ward Takes On Microsoft
From Wards page on c2.com:
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Agile Q&A: Missing Features/Requirements
Given the 3 part agile team of customer, QA, and development, what should we do when a feature the customer wanted is not implemented, or is incorrectly implemented at the end of the iteration?
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Pixel Perfect Web Design
It can't be done.
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Why Is So Much Code So Bad?
I've been in the position to read a lot of code written by many different developers. And most of it is terrible.
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What Makes A "Good" Company Different From Any Other?
I haven't had that many jobs in my life, but as a contractor for 13 years I've been in numerous companies and talked to lots of people about how much they liked their jobs. Believe it or not, the biggest reason I've found for job dissatisfaction is management.