In the last two years of using Scrum on projects the Sprint Backlog was:

Excel Spreadsheets: 6

Task Boards: 4

Spreadsheets are winning.

Our environment is a medium sized financial services company with independent projects. We don’t have Scrum of Scrums or any need for them at this point. Everyone is located on-site with the rare exception of one project that temporarily has to coordinate with a vendor off-site. All but one of the projects has worked with a collocated team.

Given our situation current practice would assume we’d probably be better off with task boards then Excel spreadsheets. Even Ryan Martens, CTO of Rally Software, agrees that:

… there is no better tooling answer than white boards and cards for individual teams and bottom-up team adoption of Agile. However, white boards and cards are not enough to support Agile development on larger programs, teams of teams, or distributed teams. In these environments, people need tools and techniques to bring the benefits of Agile to medium and large teams.

Similarly, Mark Crowe of VersionONE mentions that:

A small team huddled together in a single workspace with an on-site customer (or product owner depending on your terminology preference) can very well use index cards and whiteboards as their planning and management tools to run an incredibly effective agile process.

Other members of the Agile community can be even harsher on the spreadsheet debate including Tobias Mayer:

The Scrum books, and many CSM courses promote the use of spreadsheets to track the sprint. This is really horrible. Spreadsheets hide information, and they lie. The best way to create transparency is to display everything on Big Visible Charts. The interactive, collaborative nature of taskboards lends itself to the Scrum process, like no electronic tool ever can.

On one project we even do a task board and a spreadsheet. I had to fight a pretty intense battle to keep using the task board, even though the whole project team told me they liked it better than the spreadsheets.

The worst aspect of the spreadsheets is the inherent danger in multiple page printouts at the daily standup. Instead of just answering the basic questions and engaging in a bit of collaboration the process can break down to conversations like the following:

Team Member One: OK, yesterday I finished #42 and (rifle through a few sheets) and I started #102.

Scrum Master: Any impediments?

Team Member One: No.

Team Member Two: I worked on #34 yesterday so take 4 hours off of it.

Scrum Master: Scrum Master, hold on. (rifling back to the front sheet.) But that was only a 2 hour task so you’re all done?

Team Member Two: Oh, I guess I don’t have the newest backlog, can I borrow yours (Team Member One’s spreadsheet is handed over.)

Team Member Two: OK, so I have six hours left on #35 Credit Score Service.

Scrum Master: Anything else?

Team Member Two: Well, I’m doing the prototype for the profile page, but I don’t know where that is on here.

Now the question is keep fighting the good fight for task boards and big visible charts or go for a Agile tool like ScrumWorks, Rally, or VersionOne?

Google Developer Day was a good experience for a free event. It’s always nice to see how software development shops go out of their way to make for happy developers. There were plenty of good snacks, bean bag chairs, reasonable wireless, a foosball table and pool table. I snagged two pretty nice T-shirts and they had enough for the 1500+ developers at the San Jose Convention Center. The lunch was the best I’ve ever had at a conference of any sort. I’m guessing we were getting the Google gourmet chef experience.

The talks ranged in value. Part of the issue is they were only 1 hour and generally not technical or tutorial style talks. There was really limited times for any questions. And note to any conference organizers–when you put a single mike in the room and it fills up it’s really hard for people to pick up their laptop and clamber through the crowd just to ask a question.

It was a Google developer day so the focus was on Google tools. GWT was my focus for the day to see if it’s a reasonable approach for some of our future web apps. As it stands I’m still taking the wait and see approach after attending a few of the talks. It has some weight behind it, but I don’t think it’s really taken off as one of the defacto Java web frameworks yet. I’m pretty sure if we were leaving JSF, I’d probably favor Wicket or Struts 2 over GWT. They did have one really nice feature though. The back button actually works. Living in portlet and JSF land you often find that you don’t own the URL and supporting the back button can be nigh impossible.

Did I get enough out of it to attend next year? I’m still debating this. I’ll probably wait until next year and take a look at the agenda.

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GDD07

Does Google Gears expose your data to desktop security problems?

Google just kicked off another new product to offer offline web applications. There’s a simple plugin that’s available as a free download under a BSD license. It works for:

• Firefox
• IE
• Safari (almost!)

(With Safari it works if you build Safari’s webkit from source.)

As for operating systems it supports the big three:

• Mac
• Windows
• Linux

The first example showed Google Reader being used offline. It grabs the last 2000 feeds. The pain point is you have to tell it you’re going offline, so the syncing is a bit manual. There’s actually a tiny button to toggle. They seem to understand it just needs to know when you are offline or online and handle the syncing automatically.

SQLite is the offline database engine and it can handle full text searches of millions of documents.

Finally, the security bullet showed up. It has the same strict-origin security model.

• A web page with a particular scheme, host, and port can only access resources with the same scheme, host, and port.
• Using the Google Gears plugin is explicit and the user has to opt-in.

They didn’t address the main issue that will concern corporate IT security folks, but it is discussed on their security page:

On the other hand, two people using the same OS login could theoretically access each other’s Gears data files, just as they could access any other file on the machine.

– Google’s Security Documentation for Google Gears

The nasty scenario is one of your salespeople downloads a few hundred thousand customer records to their own machine. With traditional web applications the data never leaves the server other than to display small sections say in a search results page. With a local database cache you’re carrying around a copy of all of that information.

Looks like we’re going to see a big push for offline web applications.

Update

Turns out at least some developers have already thought about the stolen laptop use case with offline web apps. A developer of Dojo Offline talked about what to do about a stolen laptop. Dojo Offline is a new javascript library for offline use of web applications. It uses Google Gears for offline.

Without a good answer an entire swath of industries won’t dare touch offline mode. Right now Dojo offline adds a DES encryption library with functions to encrypt and decrypt. The example used encrypting/decrypting SSNs. He also pointed out that doing this in javascript can be computationally intensive and hasn’t been that feasible before. Right now though using Google Gears worker threads they can encrypt/decrypt in javascript at about 80k/second.

Good to see developers are already realizing this issue needs to be figured out.

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GDD07

May 23rd from 6:30-9:00pm the first Sacramento Ruby User Group Meeting was held at the Invision Design and Development offices in Old Sacramento. In attendance:

• Ryan – a full time Rails developer with Invision.
• Layton – a Rails developer.
• Tom Mornini – CTO of EngineYard.
• Ed Gibbs – author of this blog.

No planned agenda. No sponsored pizza and snacks. No presentations. Plenty of good conversation. I got in a little late, but the group had been discussing Rails Conf 2007. All of them were able to attend, though Tom went as a vendor so he didn’t really get to attend sessions.

The topics ranged from Django versus Rails to virtual hosting. Tom shared a few items about EngineYard, our local successful Rails startup:

• He recently hired Evan Phoenix of the Rubinius project to create a pure Ruby interpreter for Ruby.
• Ezra Zygmuntowic is moving down to the Sacramento area in the next month or so, which will help build up the local community.
• Using Xen virtualization has worked really well for them.

I’m looking forward to the next meeting.

Assumptions

• You are experienced with Java and have at least dabbled around with Ruby on Rails.
• These steps worked for me on a Mac OS X 1.0.4.9 system
• I’ve walked through the steps 3 times from scratch, but your mileage may still vary.

Install and Configure JRuby

First step download install JRuby. You can get it at:

• http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

After pulling down the tarball,

, I unpacked it and installed at:

• 1	/Applications/jruby1.0.2RC

Next, add the environment variable

to point to

. I added it to my

since I’m running the bash shell by default on Mac OS X:

Since I don’t want to take out my normal Ruby C install I just export it in front of the path just for this terminal session:

Double check that JRuby is setup:

This should return something like:

Test With A Simple JRuby App

Go ahead and setup a directory for your JRuby apps:

The last step assumes your using textmate. You can replace it with any

or any other editor you want.

Write a small JRuby app and save it:

[ruby]

require ‘java’

include_class ‘java.util.ArrayList’

list = ArrayList.new

list.add “Ruby”

list.add “+”

list.add “Java”

list.add “=”

list.add “JRuby”

puts “#{word}”

end

[/ruby]

Go ahead and run the simple ruby script and test the java integration of JRuby:

Should see:

Rails Setup

Run:

This should take about a minute. There are lots of notes on how ri and Rdoc take a long time to run right now, but it wasn’t too bad, about 5 minutes on a duo core Macbook Pro, but you can keep the two switches and save a little time.

The next step is a bit odd. For some reason the rails and rake files don’t get installed as executable. You have to make them executable and then pick up the changes using the bash

command.

Sample Rails App Running in JRuby

Then create your test rails app in JRuby. I used that idea of a book store application:

Go ahead and do a smoke test by booking up the server.

Should see a default rails page at

• http://localhost:3000

ActiveRecord JDBC Setup

Kill WEBrick and install the ActiveRecord JDBC gem:

Modify the

:

Modify

to add jdbc as an adapter type. The code goes just above

[ruby]

if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /java/

require ‘rubygems’

RAILS_CONNECTION_ADAPTERS = %w(jdbc)

end

[/ruby]

Get the MYSQL JDBC driver at:

• http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/j/

I grabbed the file

and added it to my

. You can also add it to your

instead.

Start your MySQL server if it isn’t running. I just do this from the MySQL Preferences pane.

Time to setup the databases:

Go back to the rails app and create a model for Books.

Create a simplistic migration script in the file

:

[ruby]

def self.up

table.column :title, :string

table.column :author, :string

end

end

[/ruby]

Run the migration:

Then create the scaffolding for Book:

Startup the server:

Go to the URL and see the scaffolding using JDBC:

• http://localhost/books/

Running the Tests

You should be able to run the rake command and run all the tests now. Instead you get an error about like this:

Turns out this is due to some hard coded values in the rails rake tasks. It has an easy fix by way of Ola Bini:

This pulls down a file

that I could only find in the subversion repository for now. Copy that file to the bookstore lib/tasks directory:

Time to run all the default tests with rake:

All the tests pass!

Create the WAR

Kill WEBrick again and install the rails-integration plugin to deploy setup rake tasks to create wars:

It appears the war created uses the production settings so you’ll need to create the production database:

Then fix the

to include jdbc adapters for test and production:

Go ahead and run the migration for production as well:

Then you run:

This may take a few minutes the first time, but it appears to be much faster in subsequent builds.

Deploy to Tomcat

At this point you just need to drop the mysql JDBC driver in TOMCAT’s lib directory at:

Copy the bookstore.war file to

Then startup Tomcat:

Goto the app at:

• http://localhost:8080/bookstore/books/

Now do your happy dance! Or maybe just take a break and grab a soda.

Sources

I got this recipe for deployment together from several sources:

• The general recipe was cobbled together from Buggy Velarde.
• Ola Bini for the getting started tutorials with JRuby.
• Nick Sieger for his post on ActiveRecord JDBC.
• And the Rails Integration article on the JRuby wiki.

Things To Come

• Deploy a big rails app.
• Deploy to a commercial container like Websphere Appliation Server.