Sharing Information Down the Chain

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 [...]

Sprints On An Intranet Portal

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 and [...]

KungFu Grip and Low Barrier to Entry

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 [...]

Developers and Meetings

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 transitioning from [...]

Autotest Support For Rails

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.