Wayne Allen's Weblog

pragmatic agility

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Versioning And XP

    This came across the AgileDotNet mailing list awhile back and indicates one of the misconceptions about XP that I run across regularly.

  • Public Variables In VB.NET Modules

    Interesting bit of detective work the other day I thought I'd share with everyone. A friend of a friend was having trouble with an ASP 2.0 project that was ported to ASP.NET. Turns out that on some web servers the different clients were getting their data overwritten by others. A little splunking uncovered that the application was maintaining state using a public variable declared in a VB module. I could guess what was happening, but wanted to know the details so I created a tiny test app that looked like this: