Musings of a Software Development Manager

I haven’t really spent a lot of time with RSpec since about the 0.5 release. I took a tutorial class with Dave Astels and got jazzed about the opportunity since they were really able to leverage Ruby to make a nice BDD framework. After using RSpec all JUnit test methods started including should. [...]

Agile is really designed around software projects. Infrastructure is a different animal. With an infrastructure project some things start to break down:

You usually aren’t writing much code, maybe some database install scripts so no unit tests.
Often there’s no continuous integration to speak of.
Configuration tasks on new software are often difficult to estimate.
Many tasks [...]

Continuous Integration can be a great place to do governance. With good reason developers get the shakes when someone mentions we need more governance. Past history has taught them governance often means someone above them says no.
Continuous integration allows you to inject good development practices and ensure some governance without having to always [...]

Ran across a wonderful rule when putting together your annual goals.
“A goal that a dead man can meeting is pretty useless.”
- (Comment on Manager Tools)

Some potential dead man’s goals:

Improve automation on projects.

All I need to meet this goal is a single developer with an ounce of effort to create a single ant file or shell [...]

I hadn’t realized the Head First series now has a book on software development. Curious, I took a glance at the table of contents. Topics include:

TDD
User Stories
Burn Down Charts
Continuous Integration
Test Coverage

Agile and XP practices are starting to be assumed. Maybe Ambler and others are right that Agile has really crossed the chasm. [...]

The lights went out to work today after a winter storm rolled through Sacramento. In an agile spirit we still held one of our standups after moving near one of the windows.
Scrum Master: “OK, anyone have anything to report?”
Team Member #1: “I was really productive right up until the lights went out.”
Team [...]

Reading through some old documentation today written up a few years ago by our Agile coach I came across a suggested rule of thumb for code reviews:

If more than X lines of code changed in a file then do a full code review of the file.
If less than X lines of code changed you can [...]

After committing to Haskell for my new language in 2007 it was largely a failed experiment. I never found a good learning Haskell book. I went through a few tutorials and nothing really clicked much. I found myself wanting to hack around on Ruby rather than mess around with Haskell syntax.
I really [...]

I was cleaning out the closet today when I came across this cute little onesie from an old dotcom I worked for. I had my first daughter while working as a web development manager for XUMA. She never actually wore the onesie because it got packed up in a box for our move [...]