Archives
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Speaking at SAO 11/30/05
For those of you in the Portland, OR metro area you might be interested in attending the SAO Developers SIG on Wednesday Nov 30, 2005 at 7:30am. The topic will be Agile Development - The Academic and Industry Perspectives. I will be sharing the stage with Ward Cunningham and Greg Rose. My topic will be "The Agile Customer". Hope to see you there.
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Why Don't You Take Vacation?
Recently I have run into a number of people, both employees and consultants who can’t seem to separate themselves from their work while on vacation. This behavior is extremely mystifying to me. A related phenomenon is people who won’t/don’t use their vacation. I’ve identified 4 personalities that exhibit these tendencies.
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10/13 Carnival of Agilists
Hosted by Pete Behrens the Agile Executive. Go check it out.
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Agile Process Smells: Solution Stories
One of the things that often happens when the product owner is technically savvy is that they start writing solution stories. That is they specify how something should be done technically rather than what should be done.
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Agile Process Smells: Waiting on Specialists
A common smell that is often detected in teams trying to become more agile is more and more stories/backlog items incomplete at the end of the iteration. There are a couple of different reasons this might happen, but the one I'm interested in today can be detected by the claim "I finished my tasks". The clear implication is that "I got my stuff done, but someone else didn't".
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Carnival Of The Agilists - 09/29/05
The Carnival of meme has hit the agile blog world. Check out the first edition.
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Agile Process Smells: Introduction
I've been quiet recently, but busy. Last spring I moved from the consulting world back into "regular" employment where I manage a couple of product teams and internally consult on iterative software development and agile approaches. Since starting here I have run across a number of "Process Smells" that I encountered in my coaching/consulting days that are begging to be written down. So here I go.
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Watir Hint for Working with ImageButtons
Dustin, one of my co-workers, ran into a problem accessing the "alt" attribute on image buttons using Watir and discovered a useful trick:
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Presenting TDD at Code Camp 2005 in Portland, OR
I'll be presenting a session on TDD at the 2005 Portland, OR Code Camp on July 23 at 11:15am.
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[Article]Simplify Data Layer Unit Testing using Enterprise Services
Roy has a really nice article that addresses the problem of testing data access code. The only thing is that it is missing a really important step assuming you are using object like views, stored procedures, user defined functions, rules, etc. I've been bitten in the past often enough ignoring this issue that I make sure I pick an approach rather hoping it just works.
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London Bound
I'll be in London next week (6/19-6/24) so if anyone wants to get together in the evening drop me a line.
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International Addresses
Darrell pointed me to this site on International Addresses and the complexities therein.
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Together Developer for Visual Studio.NET
Borland has released a version of Together Developer that integrates into VS.NET. Check out the screen casts. I'm thinking that Together combined with ReSharper from JetBrains could be one killer combination.
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Perspectives: A User Interface Approach Appropriate for Agile Methods?
Scott Came turned me on to a UI concept called "Perspectives" that is well implemented in Eclipse. The project has some documentation and an overview that is an interesting read.
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HDD DVD to Spell the End of Big Media as we know it?
Mike Rogers writes about how HDD DVD will change everthing.
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Combining Google Maps with CraigsList Housing - Cool Stuff
Greg Hughes turned me on to this site which combines the extremely cool Google Maps interface with the Craigs List housing listings in such a seamless way that it is hard to believe that the data comes from two completely separate sources. Check it out!
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Build Servers - Love 'em & Hate 'em
Jim Shore wrote about why he doesn't like Cruise Control. I agree to some extent with his points that the reason teams use it is to catch build errors and deal with "slow" builds. Having implemented both Draco.NET and CruiseControl.NET and toyed with FinalBuilder I am not overly impressed with any of them. My impression is that I spend way to much time fiddling the build server for the value added. I will say that I would still implement a build server for any team for the single reason that "people are fallible". People forget to commit related changes, or add files to CVS, run tests, etc. The build server never does.
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The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin
Are CDs about to become extinct?
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Chefs, Contracting Officers, and Sisyphus: Musings of a Business Analyst
Fellow Guild member Matt Deniston has a great post on the difficulties of analyzing business requirements for an integration project.
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Introducing Agile to a Legacy Project
Brian Marick has another great post. This time he talks about how to transition a team working on legacy code to a more agile approach.
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Discovering MIME types
I've been working on a little application to scratch an itch and I ran across the need to tell whether a certain file was an audio file or not. Rather than having a list of extensions (*.mp3, *.wma, ...) I decided to see if I could dig out the MIME type that Windows tracks.
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Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day
David St Lawrence has sent his book "Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day" to the printers. You can pre-order the book here.
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SqlConnection Connection String Parameter Keywords & Values
I can never find this info, so I'm filing it away.
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VS.NET Bug Followup - Or is True == 1
Allan Bogh left a comment on my previous post about the VS.NET debugger and quickwatch windows giving erroneous values:
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VS.NET Bug
One of my coworkers discovered the hard way today that in C# == is not the same as .Equals(). She had something like this:
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Getting VS.NET to Recognize @ as T-SQL Variable Prefix
Some of you may be rolling your eyes at this suggestion, but it's been bugging me for months and I finally figured out how to fix it.
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Portland, OR XP Users Group Meeting - Mar 8
XPDX is having their next meeting Tuesday March 8. If you are in the Portland, OR area next week come on by. My buddy Mark Clerget is going to talk about running an agile project in a government environment. This post is a result of some of the work they did to fit into the culture of the existing PMO.
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Published in Cutter IT Journal
My article on peer reviews has finally been published by Cutter IT Journal. Unfortunately a subscription is required to view it. I'm working on making it available freely.
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Engineering, Craft or What?
Patrick Logan writes about the debate regarding whether software development is a craft or engineering. He has an interesting spin in that what makes software seem "craft-like" is the informalities.
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David St Lawrence on Self Publishing
David St Lawrence has a series on the ongoing process of self publishing his book "Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day". Since I look into self publishing every few years or so for myself or clients I am finding David's ideas and resources to be right on target, not to mention that the self publishing option seems to be getting better every year. If you are remotely interested in this topic you need to read part I, part II and part III and any future posts.
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Clarke Ching's Secret Ingredient
A teaser from Clarke's book. If you want to know what the secret ingredient is take a look at his Sticky Minds article.
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Watch Out World - I'm now Certified!
Just got word today that I am now a Certified Scrum Master!
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Why Technology Kingdoms Rise and Fall
My guild brother Mark Clerget has a great post about Why Technology Kingdoms Rise and Fall.
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Variable Naming (Hungarian revisited)
A friend asked me today if I preferred to add a scoping prefix to variable with class scope like so:
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Extracting Column Names for a Table in SQL as a CSV String
I had a need (creating CSV BCP files) that required knowing the column names of a MS SQL table in the order they were created. Some inspiration from Mark Clerget and a little fooling around with SQL Query Analyzer resulted in the following.
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Approaching System Boundaries with TDD
Bill Caputo has a wonderfully clear explanation of how to address questions regarding using TDD at system boundaries.
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Skiplists in C#
Thanks to Patrick Logan I now know what Skiplists are.
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Practical Agile Testing
Elisabeth Hendrickson has a great post about the practicalities of agile testing where she takes Brian Marick's breakdown of testing vectors and talks about what to actually do differently to achieve agility in testing.
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Portrait Of An Agile Development Process
Jake Lawlor gives a great overview and lots of practical details around the implementation of an agile development process.
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Dynamic SQL INSERT Generator Unleashed!
Mark Clerget has another excellent post on using SQL to generate SQL. This time Mark demonstrates how to generate a series of INSERT statements from an arbitrary table.
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Beyond Bullets: Microcasts
Cliff Atkinson has recently produced several microcasts (using Camtasia)demonstrating several key aspects of his new book "Beyond Bullet Points". I've enjoyed Cliff's eye opening series on how to make stunning PowerPoint presentations.
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You know you're a geek when...
You record the Superbowl on the PVR so you can watch the commercials, but your wife makes you watch some of the plays...
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Utility: PureText
I've come to rely on this great little utility from Steve Miller.
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Portland Extreme Programming Users Group (XPDX)
XPDX is having another meeting Tuesday Feb 8, 2005. I will be running a workshop I am preparing for Agile 2005.
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Writing SQL with SQL
Mark Clerget of the Consultants Guild has a great post on generating SQL using SQL. Many moons ago Mark taught me this trick and it has served me well over the years.
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Kirk on Buy or Build
Another good post from Consultants Guild member Kirk Miller.
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Data Input Validation Using ASP.NET Forms
Kirk Miller (another Consultants Guild member) has a great introductory post on data input validation for ASP.NET forms.
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Faster Firefox
Want Firefox to run even faster? If you've got broadband change the following settings by typing about:config in the address bar.
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Keeping Databases In-Synch With Your Source Control
Jake Lawlor has a great post on keeping cruft out of your database.
Benefits of Approach: By doing this you get a versioned history of changes to your database. You also get versioned stage directories for dev, test and prod environments that have all the schema and re-runnable database objects at that point in time. These versioned stage directories correlate to a label in VSS. By automating the application of the schema and the dropping and recreating of the re-runnable objects your database will reflect your source control.
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Call for Participation - Agile 2005
Call for Participation - Agile 2005
July 24-29, 2005. Marriott Hotel, Denver, Colorado, USA.
http://www.agile2005.org -
Leaving Text Behind Again
Jon Udell wrote a piece (and another) about some technology Jonathan Edwards at SubText is putting together (demo).
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IE Clipboard Data Exposure
Via Simon:
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FormatDesigner
Chris Sells has a tool called FormatDesigner that helps you create those nasty formating strings.
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.NET Constants are Really Constant