Archives
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How to Hang a Picture
the spurious pundit has a really good post on how hard it is for manager types to do a good job of telling people what they want done.
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Product Management Rule #1
In my previous post we had some good discussion regarding rule # 1:
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10 rules for successful product managers to live by
From a copyrighted story at SoftwareCEO written by Bob Weinstein Software product management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it
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Merry Christmas Dear Reader
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Get Firefox to do NTLM
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NUnit Unit Testing of ASP.NET Pages, Base Classes, Controls and other widgetry using Cassini
NUnit Unit Testing of ASP.NET Pages, Base Classes, Controls and other widgetry using Cassini
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.NET Html Agility Pack: How to use malformed HTML just like it was well-formed XML...
.NET Html Agility Pack: How to use malformed HTML just like it was well-formed XML...
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Visualizing duplication in a linear sequence
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[grid::fatherhood]
Q: What advice would you have liked to receive when you were a new or expectant father?
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How to Demoralize your Staff (or not)
From Project, Process & Business Improvement: Are You Loved?
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Bumper Stickers for Testers
Saw this on StickyMinds today: Bumper Stickers for Testers
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Aliens Cause Global Warming
Via Clarke Ching
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Agile United
Looks like the Agile United conference website is finally up (probably for a while, but I just noticed). The call for papers is also out.
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Rolling Rocks Downhill
Check out Clarke Ching's new book project Rolling Rocks Downhill. The purpose of the book is to help people – customers, managers, workers (and even their families) – who work on traditionally managed software development projects to find a better way.
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Free Book - Essential Skills for Agile Development
The Macau Productivity Center has released a PDF version of their book Essential Skills for Agile Development. It covers the basic development skills necessary for a programmer on an agile (XP specifically) team.
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Theory of Constraints and Movie Theaters
I went to see The Incredibles (great film by the way) the other day at a theater I hadn’t been in before and I was struck by the difference as soon as I walked in the door. You buy your tickets the normal way (or online), but the snack bar has been changed into a mini-supermarket/deli. The great feature about this change is I can pick up all the food I want without waiting in line (except popcorn and some deli items). You pay at a supermarket style checkout stand. This is great since now you don’t have to wait for the guy who needs to buy popcorn for the 6 kids he has with him (oh and by the way they ran out of popcorn and have to pop more) when I just want a soda.
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Speeding Up Acrobat (Quickly)
From Scott Hanselman
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The 6 Myths Of Creativity
FastCompany has an article on the 6 myths of creativity.
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The problem with annual performance reviews
Esther Derby has a great post on an alternative to the yearly performance review.
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Where Do I Put The Logon Code?
Given that you have a dialog that is used to collect user credentials, where should the code that actually checks the credentials go? I have been given answers such as:
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The Difference Between Class & Instance Members
Recently I've run across several instances of confusion regarding class and instance members.
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The Insanity of Management Foot Dragging
An organization I once worked for had hired a CIO/VP of Engineering who played nice for about 3 months before showing his true colors. 15 months later after firing 25% of his staff (one at a time, not as a group) alienating the departments and causing another 25% to seek alternate employment he is finally asked to "resign". The remaining staff had an interesting reaction - as a group they celebrated his resignation the same day it was announced. Knowing what a dark cloud this person cast on the entire organization, why did the management team wait so long and waste do much employee potential putting up with this individual?
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Ben Hyde goes wonky
Ben Hyde posted about wanting the blue states to secede. Besides being a childish reaction to losing did he ever consider that most of the blue states voted in the 40% range for Bush and vice versa? Who's going to secede from who?
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Dan Appleman goes wonky
Dan posted about the elections and gave us advice to go join the ACLU because they protect everyone's rights (unless you're conservative). And yes I am proud to have Bush represent my party.
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Sorry about your guy
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Election Day - Enblogment
Dave Winer has a interesting idea he is calling enblogment. Here is my choice.
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StringBuilder.Equals
Interesting note: StringBuilder instances are only considered equal if Capacity, MaxCapacity and the string value are all the same. I guess it makes sense in a way, but it means I can't do a if (a == b) check because who knows what could have changed Capacity or MaxCapacity. So rather I have to do a if (a.ToString() == b.ToString())instead - messy.
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Angle brackets must go away
I was talking with Scott Hanselman (gratuitous name drop) about the difference between rpc and document style. It took me a moment since I don't deal with SOAP internals much any more. It occurred to me shortly thereafter that I don't really care other than I have a bias towards document style.
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Geek Politics
I've been listening to IT Converstations and generally getting into the podcasting thing since I do have 40-60 min commute each way and I'm oh so tired of broadcast radio. (I claim early adopter since I've been listening to audio on my giant HP Jornada for a couple of years now).
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Wil Wheaton - Why?
I was listening to Wil Wheaton's performance recorded at Gnomedex 4.0 via IT Conversations this week. The stories ranged from mildly amusing to yawners and when it was over I started wondering why Wil? Is it because he blogs? Because all geeks have a secret desire to be on Star Trek? I'm not sure. The impression I walked away with was that Wil is pretty good live performer, took a long time to get through adolescence, has had some challenges in his life and is profane. To be sure it wasn't just that performance I checked out his blog, but I still don't get it. What relevance does Wil have to geekdom? I know there are those who adamantly hate Wil for something as well as those who love him. But for me, I've decided I don't really care - at all.
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More Burndowns
Brian Marick posted here and here about burnbown chart styles and I thought I'd chime in with my variation.
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Multidimensional Methodologies
In preparation for the upcoming SPIN panel the (common) question was asked. "Is there a continuum with Waterfall on one end and Agile on the other?" My response is that the differences are multidimensional and relate more to where you are and where you want to go. So I came up with a way to look at various different software development methodologies and came up with this.
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20 Year Applications?
A client I am working with is porting several green screen applications to J2EE and one thing that keeps popping up is that we need to develop an architecture that will support these applications for the next 20 years just like the last one did.
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Incrementalists versus Completionists
Joel turned me on to a Rands In Response posting titled "Incrementalists versus Completionists" where Rands relates a discussion with a co-worker where the co-worker found a problem, Rands suggested a temporary and incomplete solution that could be achieved in the time allowed. Rands was then stunned to find out his co-worker saw that as worse than doing nothing.
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Advice for Software Development Managers - Jerry Weinberg
Check out the interview Software Development Magazine did with Jerry Weinberg.
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Maintenance Team? Balderdash!
In many organization I've encountered there is this artificial distinction between the new development group and the maintenance programming group. Why on God's green earth would you want to do such a thing?
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Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
Chris Matts turned me on to the JBehave project (here and here). At first I was skeptical because I didn't see anything different from the xUnit frameworks. However, on contemplating for a moment the fact that I also don't believe that xUnit tests are "Tests" and that I like the "Example" terminology from Brian Marick. The "Behavior" and "Should" terminology start to feel right to me. I'm not sure we need a new project to achieve this. At least with nUnit we can name the methods anything we want, and if you really wanted to you could create new attributes to replace [Fixture] and [Test].
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Agile Panel Discussion
Ward Cunningham and I have been invited to represent the Agile software development proponents at a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Rose City SPIN and PNSQC. The panel discussion is titled "Agile and Traditional Development: A Creative Synergy" and will be 5:30pm on October 13, 2004 in conjunction with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).
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Cost of Change
Clark Ching had a brief post relating the requirements churn rate (25%) to the average cost of change (50x) yielding a 13.5x increase in the time required to complete all requirement in a project assuming the original estimate didn't take changes into account (and how many do).
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Goals & Actions
Have you seen goal/action conflicts like this in your organization? Secondarily why do organizations feel they have to hide these goals?
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Management & Leadership
I ran across this little gem today:
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XP/Agile Universe
I'll be attending XP/Agile Universe in Calgary, Alberta August 15-18. Send me a note if you're also attending and we'll try to hook up.
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Visual Studio 6 SP6 is Now Available
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Practical Testing
Len Holgate is writing a series of posts on Unit Testing with a non-trivial example. Good stuff, check it out.
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Precision & Accuracy
This came across this on the IXP list today from Don Wells and I thought it was one of the better descriptions of precision and accuracy.
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Agile Customer Mailing Lists
Via Brian Marick:
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How Agile got Agile
This came through on the Agile Project Management group today from Mike Beedle of Scrum fame. A nice summary of how we got the “agile“ moniker and a few things to think about.
> Actually, "Agility" (and especially "Business Agility")
> pre-dates XP, etc.
Yes, it does. In fact, the word "agile", as in "agile development"
was chosen because it was thought to be a good "sales" word among
upper management -- something managers could understand and
associate with it as something cool but without any
connotations of failure.
If you recall, there was a "Business Agility" wave circa (95-97),
that "never failed".. perhaps because the Internet wave took over,
or perhaps because its lack of overall specificity. Either
way, "Agile" was a cool word with management and not associated
with failure, "being passe", high risk, or high expenses,
like BPR, TQM, Knowledge Management, Future Creating Company,
or Learning Organization.
When we were at Snowbird in 2001, we proposed many words:
adaptable, lightweight, lean, adaptive, essential,
people-oriented, value-oriented, (and many more I can't recall),
I proposed that "agile": word for the above reasons.
(Of course, the rest of the group voted for it.)
In my opinion, some things "were lost" from the meeting.
Here are some things that still remain to be fully explored:
Values
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- Trust
- Respect
- Sharing Knowledge
- Constant Learning
- People over Process
- Communication
- Feedback
- Simplicity
- Courage
- Truth of the code/Executable
using the code to learn
Principles
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Customer Value
Individual Capability
Collaboration
Adaptation
Simplicity
Customer connected to process
Integrated Testing
Short Cycles
Lots of feedback
Social Networks
Feedback outside of the team
Always ready to ship
Deliberate Diversity
Minimal Roles
Minimal Artifacts
Low Bureaucracy
X functional teams -
Explorable Languages
Bret Pettichord of Lessons Learned in Software Testing fame is doing his Scripting for Testers class in the Northwest this week for PNSQC. He and I got together last night to shoot the breeze and had some great conversations. If you are looking for someone on the cutting edge of agile testing you can do no better than Bret.
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Portland XP
If you are in Portland, OR tomorrow come join Ian Goodrich and myself as we compare and contrast XP projects we coached.
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Marick on FIT
Check out Brian Marick's series on FIT if you are at all interested in how this stuff works in real life.
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Did You Say What I Thought You Meant?
I heard this one the other day and it rang so true I have to share it.
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Xtreme Simplicity
Anybody know what happened to Jeremy Kothe and Xtreme Simplicity? I love their C# Refactory product, but evidently they are no longer issuing evaluation keys nor are they sending out keys that have been paid for.
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Customer Experience and Customer Expectations
I recently had a conversation with my cell phone carrier that went something like this:
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Multiprojecting
Johanna Rothman has written a nice article on the pitfalls of Multiprojecting. While others such as Gerald Weinberg, Jim Highsmith and Mary Poppendeick have correctly pointed out similar issues the primary thing that is missing from these discussion is why managers try to do this in the first place, and how project staff can “manage upwards” to correct or at least lessen the impact of this poor practice.
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When Tests Aren't Tests
There has been a great discussion on the XP and XP-Testing mailing lists about what “tests” are and how Exploratory Testing relates to XP/Agile development.
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Hosting Company with Customer Service
If any of you out there want a recommendation for a hosting company that wants to take care of you. Check out CyberGate Web Hosting. I had the opportunity to put them to the test last week and they came through with flying colors. No .NET hosting, it is all Redhat, but very inexpensive and great uptimes.
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NAnt Vault Tasks Updated
Jonathan Cogley asked and posted about needing an update to the NAnt Vault tasks. I can't say everything is perfect, but I have updated the code so it will compile. I don't have everything I need to fully test the changes (primarily updates to NAnt 0.8.4 and Vault 2.0), plus I had to remove the Label task since it isn't obvious how to do that with the new vault APIs.
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Web Services Everywhere (& problems too)
Well for years I've avoided the hype around web services (other than building my own XML-RPC based system). Now, however, I've had 2 project in a row that were completely based on my system consuming web services. The first was Microsoft CRM which worked nicely, if slowly, from .NET client to CRM server. The second project is starting to give me fits because it is a VB6 client to .NET Web Service. The SOAP Toolkit just doesn't do it for me, plus MS is going to retire it in July '04. So I looked at PocketSOAP which works great unless there is a Guid in the WSDL, because the schema for microsoft.com/wsdl/types doesn't seem to exist anywhere that I can see.
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DropLoad - Temporary FTP
Others have recommended this site lately. I've just had an opportunity to use it and I must say it is great!