Musings of a Software Development Manager

Simon Baker posted some pictures of his tracking white board. He actually has a velocity column on the far right end that occurs to me is a really good idea. Puts a visible focus on how much your actually able to accomplish for the Sprint instead of just the remaining hours for tasks.

Yesterday I got to hear two experience reports on our Agile/Scrum pilot projects from two peer managers who aren’t exactly strong proponents of Agile. I assume this is happening more places now that Agile is moving beyond the early adopters. Anway onto the experience reports. From a web development manager:

The idea of [...]

iBATIS, the SQL based ORM will finally be getting a book length treatment. It’s a pretty simple mapping framework that relies on good old SQL. We’ve used iBATIS frequently in the past several years and we continue to use it for connecting to our legacy system over using Hibernate.
Our issue is that we [...]

Bruce Eckel has posted a short post on 7 questions to ask an interviewer:
1. If I want to buy something like a book or a tool, how does the process work (how hard is it?). What’s the cost limit before the approval must go up the management chain?
In my group the process is simple, [...]

One of our developers came across a strange fix to an error message we kept getting in Websphere Portal Search 5.1.0.3. The error message was along the lines:
1Didn’t find SeedList in HTML, not a SeedList URL
You might try adding a little known property to portal search:
1HTTP_NON_APPL_MAX_BODY_SIZE_MB = 4
The parameter is supposed to set the [...]

One of the small podcast I’ve followed for at least a year now is Python 411. I haven’t actually coded in Python for years, but the host, Ron Stephens is just so excited about the topic that I still find I enjoy it. Passion is important.
My python story is simple, I picked it [...]

When ideas become dogma:
In Agile, the developers have to sit at the end of the row along the open hallway when everyone’s collocated. The business analysts have to be in the middle because they have to communicate with everyone.
In other words there’s a seating chart for an Agile team area. Or,
Sprints are [...]

It’s almost always good to bring food to a meeting, particularly a longer planning type meeting, and I suck at it. The last time I brought food was to a TDD seminar I ran and I managed to bring peanut M&Ms and two people in the training session were allergic to peanuts.
I used to [...]

James Robertson had quote on how often huge failed projects continue under their own momentum:

“A week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot [...]

I realized today my former office has officially become a team room. One of my employees came by to talk and I had to guide us to another meeting room because an ad-hoc meeting had started after one team’s daily meeting. Feels like a lot better use of the space.