Musings of a Software Development Manager

On vacation in San Diego I ended up at one of my favorite locations, an Apple Store. Turns out with two 5 and a half year olds the Apple store is a mini entertainment center.
Apple’s Photobooth, one of the free little applications you get with all the new Macs, proved a [...]

I had quite a few one-on-ones with developers today and almost all of them started with:
“Wow, I didn’t realize you took out the desk.”
Last Thursday my desk partition was removed and replaced with a smallish circular table for meetings and to have more of a team room atmosphere. My normal office these days is [...]

Confluence is available for a free license for non-profits who can’t afford to pay. Our local java users group (SACJUG) fit the bill for this, though no one’s ever been quite organized enough to officially register as a non-profit.
At the last SACJUG meeting we debated over what wiki/content management system to use and eventually [...]

I’m a tools guy. I love to try out new tools. I get excited by the most boring of build tools like ant, maven, or rake or even code review tools like Jupiter or Crucible. In the book Applied Software Project Management they introduce the concept of building support for change [...]

I’m working my way through a for fun side project using Rails 1.1 and I’ve been using ActiveRecord migrations instead of the older style SQL scripts. I like them a lot because it allows me to continue to stay in Ruby. Still each time you want to make a change to a table [...]

Yesterday my organization invented a new Agile methodology–Agile Lite! You might recognize it as Scrum minus collocation.

30 Day Sprints
Planning Meetings
Product Backlogs
Review Meetings
Sprint Backlog
Daily Standups
Scrum Master
Product Owner

The name is a bit humorous, but as long as we get to run it as an Agile/Scrum project I’m not really very concerned about the actual name we [...]

Approximately two weeks after coming up with a new layout to swap my office into a team room I now have the following:

The vision was to pull out all the cabinets and mount another large whiteboard on the west wall and bring in a couch. This mainly just turns the focus of the room [...]

Apparently all of the hype around SOA wasn’t enough for Gartner and others so now we have SOA 2.0. Apparently you take SOA 1.0 + Event Driven Architecture. Pure Madness.

Kudos to Bluehost for adding Rails hosting, but you might have found getting more than a trivial example running is an exercise in frustration. The following checklist details at least one successful path to getting a full Rails app up and running. (Much of the basic outline comes from the following Bluehost knowledgebase [...]

Simon Baker has a very good example of a team charter for an Agile project developed in Iteration Zero. It spells out how the team will do estimating, track progress, do TDD, implement continuous integration, and coding standards. This is the sort of example based template you can take and show your own [...]