Musings of a Software Development Manager

Our builds are failing today on one project. They’re failing because one of the developers asked me to turn on a Clover failure target. Now if the unit test coverage falls below 75% the build fails. The 75% number was fairly arbitrary, but you have to pick something.
The fact that we’ve [...]

Turns out my problem with getting ruby to recognize the xml-simple rubygem was solved by a simple require statement:
require ‘rubygems’
Configuration issues are so often the bane of programming. Anyway the necessity for this is explained here as in RTFM.

I like Ruby gems, I can see the resemblance to Perl’s old CPAN idea. CPAN always drove me crazy since everything you pulled down then had say 8-10 more libraries that it required. Till this day I still avoid often avoid perl just because of the pain of constantly installing libraries to get [...]

This week I scheduled a Sprint Planning Meeting to select the backlog on a project. Our normal time box for this meeting is about 4 hours. Since this is the 4th Sprint for this project and these meetings have generally only been going 90-120 minutes in the last few planning meetings I actually [...]

One of the greatest advantages of Agile is the ability to release early and often. It stands in stark contrast to the waterfall approach where you finally deliver at the very end if you deliver at all.
Though ROI is notoriously difficult to calculate with many IT software projects, releasing as soon as you have [...]

I ran across the idea of an iteration zero today reviewing Peter Schuh’s Integrating Agile Development in the Real World. He defines it as:

An iteration zero does not deliver any functionality to the customer. Instead the project team focuses on the the simple processes that will be required for the adoption and use [...]

This afternoon we held an update on our Agile pilot projects for much of the executive leadership of the company including the CEO. It was led by our agile coach and championed by our CIO.
At this point I’m not sure what to make of the results, but we still have a green light to [...]

Given that I really only have one semi-real Ruby on Rails app on my machine I went ahead an threw caution to the wind and upgraded to the newest Rails 1.1.2. No problems until I ran my unit tests and got complete failures with messages like:

test_save_valid_order(StoreControllerTest):
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql::Error: Lost connection
to MySQL sever during query: DELETE [...]

Tim Shadel recommends when doing code reviews to review no more than 5-6 classes for a one hour review session. I violated that rule of thumb last week, and I can see how it burns you out just reviewing that much code ahead of time. And I have a feeling when we go [...]

I came across this post about Agile mascots from Kane Mar via the Carnival of the Agilists.
Indigenous peoples have been running well organized tribal meetings for many thousands of years. One of the methods that they developed involves a token often called a Talking Stick. Traditional Talking Sticks are decorated with carvings, feathers or other [...]