Throw It On the Backlog

A familiar scenario played out today on one of our Scrum projects. The customer had been thinking about one of the administration screens and how it could be enhanced. The requirements for it had already been baselined for the Sprint, but they were really interested in the new functionality.

On this particular project the [...]

IBM’s Processor Value Units

Being a customer of Big Blue can be pretty painful sometimes. We recently learned that IBM has conveniently decided to radically restructure their licensing agreements around Websphere. Their plan to make sure they get all possible revenue is to charge per core on a processor and per processor type.

According to our contract they can [...]

Starting a Tutorial With Testing

One of the minor disappointments of Ruby on Rails: Up and Running was that like so many other texts didn’t get to the testing topics until the last chapter. There reasoning was:

We’ve come this far with our Photo Share web application, but we haven’t yet created any tests. In truth, this was deliberate. You [...]

Testing in the Next Sprint

Elizabeth Hendrickson is blogging quite a bit recently which can only be a good thing. In a recent post she takes on the problem with getting all the testing done in a Sprint:

The team decided to relieve the pressure on the testers by moving the test effort into the next Sprint. So the features [...]

Code Review Evolutions

We’re well into a year of introducing code reviews and I’ve noticed a continued evolution over that year.

At first we used no tools, printed out the code ahead of time, and then walked through it with an overhead and a projector in a formal meeting. Then we introduced tools, first Jupiter and then Crucible. [...]