July « 2006 « Musings of a Software Development Manager

The Agile Toolkit Podcast

It’s not the most updated technical podcast around, not the most polished sounding, and follows pretty much just an interview format, but I really like when the occasional new Agile Toolkit episode pops up. The host Bob Payne follows a simple format:

Attend a conference. Corner as many good speakers as you can. Get them [...]

Sprint Without A Burndown Chart

I’ve been experimenting with leaving off a sprint burndown chart for the last two sprints on a project. Everything critical is tracked on a corkboard and I have a separate chart that shows where we are as far as moving content onto a new intranet. So far no one’s missed it.

Part of the [...]

Ruby Versus Java Conventions

Having spent a long time almost exclusively coding Java since about 2001. I have some mental baggage when it comes to adjusting to Ruby. Excepting some tinkering in PHP and Python in the last five years I’ve primarily been living in an IDE with Java when I actually got to code.

I realize I have [...]

RSpec 0.5.14 Out

Yesterday I found a minor bug in RSpec 0.5.13. Today I got around to adding it to their RubyForge bugtracker complete with a suggested fix. Then I notice RSpec 0.5.14 just got released late tonight July 13, 2006. And there’s a release note on my bug being fixed:

1* Sugar (underscores) now works correctly with [...]

A Small Bug in RSpec 0.5.13

I’m doing a recreational Rails project in my infrequent spare time and using RSpec as well. After generating a controller for the

1Game

class I noticed it failed on a very simple specification.

controller.should_be_an_instance_of GameController

The failure message was:

undefined method ‘an_instance_of?’ for #<GameController:0x222df78>

That looked pretty wrong. Why was it trying to call

1an_instance_of? [...]

Bring a Laptop to Your Interview

Apparently the Java developers market in Sacramento is heating up these days with about 20+ positions largely contracting for between $45-$75/hr. On that note one of the developers in the audience mentioned that he was doing a lot of interviewing and that bringing actual code on a laptop to an interview would really impress him, [...]

Rails and RSpec over Lunch

With two small children at home I’ve lately been trying to get in about an hour of coding around lunch. These days thats Ruby on Rails and RSpec. I spent about half an hour today trying to figure out why RSpec was failing on the following:

"bob".should_be "bob"

Seemed reasonable especially since the following passed [...]

Bringing In Mentoring Consultants

Bruce Eckel related some enlightening evidence that many organizations aren’t comfortable bringing in a high end experience consultant to help review their code and architectures: Reference

In all the years that I have offered design reviews, code reviews, and walkthroughs, only one client has ever used these services.

I can second that anecdotal advice. [...]

Office to Team Room

At the suggestion of a developer I’ve revisited the idea of turning my office into a true team room. After about 6 months in the cube farm my office is pretty much just used as a team room anyway. Here’s the current office:

The current layout has a few issues:

One whole wall is [...]

Sprints in Peopleware

I ran across this quote in Peopleware:

The chemistry-building manager take pains to divid the work into pieces and makes sure that each piece has some substantive demonstration of its own completion. Such a manager may contrive to deliver a product in twenty versions, even though two are sufficient for upper management and the user. [...]

Musings of a Software Development Manager