Musings of a Software Development Manager

As a manager you’re often privy to information that isn’t necessarily passed down the chain or broadcast to line employees. Many managers horde much of this information and unwittingly lose out on a lot of good information.
If you regularly hold back information from employees they will soon learn that sharing rumors and news with [...]

Just held the review today for the end of Sprint #6 on an intranet portal project. We’re pretty much down to Sprint #7 and then we can finally release it on the employees. Along the way we’ve learned the following things:

Websphere Portal 5.1.0.3 and especially it’s content management features (WCM) are fairly primitive [...]

My brother and a very good friend recently launched a little web 2.0 site around ranking webcomics, KungFuGRIP. It rips on the Digg/Reddit model, but specializes in a narrow vertical. The cool thing is it got created and launched with nothing but some time investment:
With the Web of today you can put something [...]

The lack of multiple planning/coordination meetings in Scrum is a key appeal for developers. The message is very clear. Spend one day planning and then Sprint for the next 30 days. Check in every day for 15 minutes and then let the team decide if they need other meetings.
Simple enough, unless you’re [...]

Rails is just darn nice for making easy to test. I finally got around to trying out the autotest package (via a mention byLuke Melia) and now I’m just churning away TDD style while the tests run in a terminal window, without stopping to do any invocation or even a keystroke.

Apparently GreenPepper’s Accept launched at Agile 2006 as an acceptance testing framework built into a wiki. The idea is much like Fit/Fitnesse, with at least a few differences given that it’s based upon running in Confluence, and it has an open source version and a pay version. You can get a quick look [...]

Sitting in my cube at work at 8:30pm on a Saturday it hit me. I really need to work on my delegating skills.
After catching up on a bunch of todo items, notes, and emails from the past week I delved into an existing problem with one of our projects builds. It [...]

James Shore posted on the idea that you should favor synchronous integration:

Run the build on your local workstation and make sure everything builds and passes tests. (This step is optional but helpful.)
Check that the integration token is available. If it isn’t, wait until it is, then get the latest changes from the repository. The revision [...]

At a recent team meeting four out of eleven developers missed the meeting. None of them planned ahead of time to miss the meeting, and all of them were a little surprised when I mentioned it to them.
Three of the four who missed the meeting are not collocated anywhere near the bulk of the [...]

Reading through Scott Ambler’s recent results of his Agile survey it stood out that one of the least used practices was colocation. Common coding conventions were almost 4 times as popular and even pair programming is more popular than colocation. Fighting the facilities battle is still a losing battle many places.