Musings of a Software Development Manager

I’ve been intrigued with Fit/Fitnesse since Bob Martin introduced me to it at a session at SD West 2005. Of course that was about 18 months ago and despite playing with it a fair bit myself and even giving a talk on it at our local JUG, we still haven’t implemented it on any projects. [...]

I’ve latched on to the Pragmatic’s suggestion to pick up a new language each year. This year it was Ruby of course. A couple things from Smalltalk to Lisp to Haskell have been buzzing around in my head, but I think I’ve settled on Haskell as the candidate. The main reason is being a functional [...]

Generally if a Scrum Master is off on vacation the role should temporarily fall to someone on the team to cover the standups, attempt to remove impediments, and generally keep things moving. What doesn’t work that well is having another Scrum Master who has no relation to the project step in help. They don’t have [...]

We’ve been holding code reviews for close to a year now and the process has evolved from the first days. We’ve seen many of the common benefits: Better code quality and readability. Catching some defects early. Mentoring opportunities around design. We’re still a bit informal about it and probably reviewing less code than we should, [...]

A few days ago a customer/product owner asked us for an estimate of the completion date for a project. None of the developers responded, so the Scrum Master is pressing for an estimate. The state of our incomplete information is thus: There is an incomplete product backlog, it contains almost every item for a first [...]

I took a personal day this past Friday after realizing I was just burnt, fried, and generally stressed and not that useful. I pondered whether I should or not for far too long. The reason for the difficult decision–I didn’t want to give up control of several projects. I’d been planning to take a personal [...]

I budgeted this year for dual 20″ monitors or one 24″ monitor for each developer. With prices dropping now maybe we can go to a single 30″. Keeping your IDE, a browser, a terminal window, and an email client certainly helps with productivity.

I implement my personal organization system in 37 Signals Backpack. I’ve had a subscription now for about 15 months and its been the best way I can find to maintain David Allen’s GTD method. After a lot of experimentation including trying out other tools such as just tracking everything on index cards, or using Kinkless [...]

I learned a few days ago that a simple information radiator such as a task board can be extremely threatening. Our PM/Scrum Master on a project announced a recent unilateral decision to switch meeting rooms simply to escape the dangerous distractions of a task board. Apparently the team found the task board a more useful [...]

I finally got around to looking at FacesTrace, a JSF debugger. Looks like it might be helpful especially with the nasty conversion errors and other joys of JSFs six phase lifecycle.