Today, I want to share some of my favorite blog posts about agile with you. Without further ado, here they are: How Do Story Points Relate to Hours? - One recurring question I get asked when talking about agile (and specifically when estimating in Story Points) is how those things relate. Mike Cohn does a … Continue reading Four Agile Posts Everyone Should Read
Author: Matthias Marschall
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
Visibility Builds Trust
Last week, the CTO of a partner company came over to me and asked: "Hey Matthias, do you have any benchmarks on how many commits your developers do each day? And how many lines of code they produce? I would love to compare the performance of our teams to be able to show my CEO … Continue reading Visibility Builds Trust
A Simple Checklist To Multiply Productivity
Maybe this sounds familiar to you: To maximize advertising revenues, it is necessary to constantly optimize ad placements, ad layouts and ad formats used on your site. This leads to a flood of really small user stories, which are often written like this: Please put 3 AFS ads after the first search result, 3 ads … Continue reading A Simple Checklist To Multiply Productivity
A Luxury Problem: How Emerging Iterations Eat Team Commitment For Breakfast
We've managed our complete development with Pivotal Tracker for over a month now, and never looked back. All in all, our administrative overhead simply vanished and the flow of implementing user stories smoothed out quite a bit. All's well that ends well, you might want to say. But the last couple of weeks raised some … Continue reading A Luxury Problem: How Emerging Iterations Eat Team Commitment For Breakfast
Howto Get Started With Carpet
In my post about Carpet is a re-mix of existing configuration management solutions, I gave you a rough overview of the problems I tried to address with Carpet. In this article, I want to show you how you can set up a complete Ruby on Rails stack with only a few lines of configuration while … Continue reading Howto Get Started With Carpet
Configuration Management remixed: Introducing Carpet
Migrating our production environment from debian to OpenSolaris I wanted to simplify our configuration management recipes along the way. What I came up with is a mixture of Puppet style manifests and Capistrano backed ease of use in a new open source project called: Carpet. Building Your Infrastructure With Plain Capistrano Initially we've built our … Continue reading Configuration Management remixed: Introducing Carpet
Puppet or Capistrano – Use the Right Tool for the Job
This is a guest post by Andrew Shafer, who is part of Reductive Labs, the people behind Puppet. Reductive Labs is helping people build better systems with better tools and processes. Andrew has been on several Agile software teams in various capacities for the past few years, and has a passion for applying Agile principles … Continue reading Puppet or Capistrano – Use the Right Tool for the Job
Super-simple Ruby Subversion Command Line Wrapper
Like Dan did recently, I was setting up a Subversion repository one year ago. Of course, I also wanted to have regular backups of my Subversion repository. As I was tired of writing bash scripts for such a task, I looked into writing a simple Ruby script for backing up my Subversion repositories. Full and … Continue reading Super-simple Ruby Subversion Command Line Wrapper
Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker
As I've shown in my plea to Agile Tool Vendors: Please simplify my life, I currently see only Pivotal Tracker to be a tool which simplifies my life instead of managing complexity. Enterprise Class vs Opinionated Software Maybe the biggest differences between Mingle and Tracker are their core assumptions and target audience. While Mingle is … Continue reading Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker
Agile Tool Vendors: Please don’t try to manage complexity – simplify my life!
We've been using Mingle for over one year now and it serves us quite well. During the course of the year, we used it to manage over 2000 stories, issues and chores, and we currently only have around 90 open ones left. The only major shortcoming in my eyes is the lack of a real … Continue reading Agile Tool Vendors: Please don’t try to manage complexity – simplify my life!
