Today I spent the whole day debugging an elusive concurrency problem in ruby on rails running on JRuby. We start some threads during the web request and, usually sooner than later, all our database connections are blocked. Getting deep into the details of multithreading, connection pooling and the like is nothing I enjoy doing. Especially … Continue reading Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
Author: Matthias Marschall
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
Open Communication Stops De-Motivating your Team
Instead of motivating our teams, we should simply stop de-motivating them. Everyone you work with is highly motivated by default. But, bad information policies, countermanding orders or simply ignoring ideas will turn a highly motivated team member into a disgruntled road block. Open Communication Highly skilled team members are able to deal with the truth. … Continue reading Open Communication Stops De-Motivating your Team
“Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
It's a very important thing for any agile team to find a definition of Done, which fits the expectations and the environment of the current development. For User Stories, I definitely prefer Done = Released as the most helpful metric. Only if a story is really out there serving users can you truly forget about … Continue reading “Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
A Kanban Board for Features
We're using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It's great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We're really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we … Continue reading A Kanban Board for Features
Continuous Improvement and the busyness trap
You want to be agile. You want to realize value for your customers as fast as possible. And you want to get better every time you do something. Great! But beware! You might get caught in the busyness trap. Your website is out there running for some time. You're quite happy with it, but, of … Continue reading Continuous Improvement and the busyness trap
Agile Project Management Tools Evolving: Kanban FTW
It's been a while since we were using Thoughtworks Mingle as our agile project management tool. We liked their Kanban style Card Walls View a lot. Nevertheless, we switched to PivotalTracker because of its superior support of prioritizing stories in a backlog and automated iteration planning. Unfortunately, PivotalTracker does not offer any Kanban style card … Continue reading Agile Project Management Tools Evolving: Kanban FTW
The 12 principles behind the agile manifesto adapted to web operations
Walking once again through the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto, I realized how tailored they are for software development projects. Yet experience has shown that agile practices are not strictly limited to development projects, but to all areas involved in bringing a software product to the users. Here is my version of the twelve … Continue reading The 12 principles behind the agile manifesto adapted to web operations
Real World Example: Using factory_girl to simplify our test setup
When you do integration testing in a ruby on rails application, you don't want to stub out all involved models. Rails' built in approach of using fixtures is considered to be sub-optimal and the way to go today is to use factories. Homegrown Factories In our application we used to write our own factories, one … Continue reading Real World Example: Using factory_girl to simplify our test setup
New Conference On Agile System Administration: Devopsdays 2009
Devopsdays 2009 After years of advocating, @patrickdebois's dream came true: He created the Devopsdays. Quoting his announcement from the Agile System Administration Google Group: Devopsdays '09, the conference that tries to get the best of both dev and ops world. Two days of fun and interesting talks. So if you are a developer with a … Continue reading New Conference On Agile System Administration: Devopsdays 2009
Kanban for Lean Project Management with agilezen.com
Zen is a brand new Kanban tool for lean project management. In contrast to PivotalTracker, which concentrates on automating iteration management for SCRUM like projects, Zen's main view is a story board. The funny thing is, that I preferred the stroy board view in Mingle over the list view provided by PivotalTracker before I started … Continue reading Kanban for Lean Project Management with agilezen.com
