Sprints On An Intranet Portal

Just held the review today for the end of Sprint #6 on an intranet portal project. We’re pretty much down to Sprint #7 and then we can finally release it on the employees. Along the way we’ve learned the following things:

  • Websphere Portal 5.1.0.3 and especially it’s content management features (WCM) are fairly primitive and not that well integrated for maintaining a content site with 40+ contributers.
  • Having 4 different product owners over the life of the project makes it difficult to stay headed in a single direction. Luckily the last remaining product owner has been working directly on the team for the last three or four sprints.
  • Estimating and tracking many of the work items are difficult. How do you estimate how many training classes you need, and how do you know when you’re done? How many items are just pure timeboxed research into possible intranet features? And at the review meeting how do you demonstrate new functionality when say 60% of the Sprint was setting up and running training classes.
  • Intranet projects are inherently political beasts. Everyone has a vested interest or even lack of interest in how their division’s content is organized. You will end up in some huge conflicts despite all possible precautions.
  • Many normal Agile related practices are non-existent. TDD, continuous builds, refactoring just don’t apply.

KungFu Grip and Low Barrier to Entry

My brother and a very good friend recently launched a little web 2.0 site around ranking webcomics, KungFuGRIP. It rips on the Digg/Reddit model, but specializes in a narrow vertical. The cool thing is it got created and launched with nothing but some time investment:

With the Web of today you can put something up with little heavy lifting. An engineer friend and I built the majority of my last project, KungFuGRIP, in a Sunday afternoon using Drupal. Once live we started making tweaks based on user feedback.

Developers and Meetings

The lack of multiple planning/coordination meetings in Scrum is a key appeal for developers. The message is very clear. Spend one day planning and then Sprint for the next 30 days. Check in every day for 15 minutes and then let the team decide if they need other meetings.

Simple enough, unless you’re transitioning from a normal project management environment with command and control. Meetings suddenly appear on everyone’s schedule. The concept of just letting the team decide these things is lost and you have a lot of unhappy developers in meetings wondering how they’re going to meet their coding commitments.

The story is very different if the team decides to have a meeting to say review a rough draft of the likely use cases for the next Sprint, or talk about how to resolve an issue with how long it takes to migrate code to the QA environment. There the team members have committed to each other to attend and help out. That personal commitment is really the point. And often these can be informal meetings in a cube or an empty conference room rather than a scheduled two hour session in the middle of the afternoon.

It’s hard to evolve out of traditional meeting hell.

Autotest Support For Rails

Rails is just darn nice for making easy to test. I finally got around to trying out the autotest package (via a mention byLuke Melia) and now I’m just churning away TDD style while the tests run in a terminal window, without stopping to do any invocation or even a keystroke.

GreenPepper Steps Into Fitnesse’s Space

Apparently GreenPepper’s Accept launched at Agile 2006 as an acceptance testing framework built into a wiki. The idea is much like Fit/Fitnesse, with at least a few differences given that it’s based upon running in Confluence, and it has an open source version and a pay version. You can get a quick look at it in their demo sandbox.

Right now they promise that:

After using FIT for a while, we began to have ideas on how to extend its vision and reach. We looked at the code and we felt that doing a cleanroom implementation would be better.

I’m not sure what those ideas are right now, but it probably doesn’t hurt to have some more options in the acceptance testing tools space.