I changed up the usual way I run the detailed part of our Sprint planning meeting with everyone coming up with tasks. For almost all prior meetings:

• Stick selected backlog items for the Sprint up on the wall on giant stickies.
• One by one lead the discussion on what tasks need to be done for each item.
• Write each task down, come up with an hour estimate, and generally let someone claim the work or assign it to the team.
• Repeat until finished with all backlog items.

Today at the suggestion of some of my developers on another project, I changed things up a bit:

• Hand out large 5×7 stickies and pens to everyone on the team.
• Stick the backlog items on the wall.
• People started to write down their tasks and walked up to the wall and pasted them under the backlog items.
• Then I just facilitated walking through each backlog item and asking if we needed any more tasks and adding hour estimates to tasks that didn’t have them. In some cases team members just wrote down new tasks as they thought them up and added them throughout the discussion.
• Repeat until finished with all backlog items.

Overall the experience was better, we got done a little quicker, and the tasks had the names the people doing the work had defined.

My hesitation to try this approach had come from one early Sprint on a project. I had handed out stickies to start the process, but almost everyone was new to Agile and they hardly wrote any tasks. In order to really pull out the tasks I had to stand up and really lead the discussion, writing down each of the tasks myself. As I got adjusted to working this way I just fell into a habit.

It never hurts to reexamine and test your assumptions.

After a recent code review I noticed a lot of code similar to the following:

this.createAUser();

or

if (this.isValidProfile()) {

Our coding standards allow for using this with fields to make the distinction clear:

private int count;
pubic void setCount(int count) {
  this.count = count
}

We adopted The Elements of Java Style for our coding style guide about 2.5 years ago, but this is a case I’d never spent much time thinking about. I find it a lot clearer to write something like:

createAUser() 

or

if (isValidProfile()) {

I always assumed this was a well understood convention, but after spending some Googling around I found nothing specifically on idioms with using this with methods.

I think the best evidence in favor of not using the this keyword is with Martin Fowler’s Extract Method pattern. You often create small methods by doing a simple extract of a code fragment on a method that’s getting a little long. And Martin’s example suggests calling the extracted methods with:

printBanner();
printDetails(getOutstanding())

not:

this.printBanner();
this.printDetails(this.getOutstanding())

For me it all comes down to better readability, but we’ll probably have a short meeting with some of the senior developers to toss it around and come to a final decision. If we hadn’t been doing code reviews on a regular basis we might have never addressed this issue.

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. Given that I’m unfortunately the resident expert on it, I think it’s finally time to push it directly even if that means doing some coding to show people how it could work on a real project. Now I just need to find time to keep up with the management duties as well.

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 language it has the ability to stretch my skills the most.

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 any context to work from and at most they’re going to mechanically record status updates on tasks. Maybe they can try to remove some impediments, but again they lack context.

Given a choice leave it up to the team who fills in the Scrum Master role while they’re on vacation.