Currently, I'm preparing for teaching my next course on Agile Methodology. Again and again, I wonder what is the single most important thing my students should be able to take with them after four full days. One of my core messages is definitely that agile is more about principles than about practices. If you absorb … Continue reading Waterfall, SCRUM and Lean Software Development simulation as teaching platform
Giving up – or not?
"Never give up" is an advice we hear far too often. We're taught that giving up is a failure. But nothing could be further from the truth if we're caught in a dead end. If there is nothing left to reach, why should we bother to go on? It's a waste of time and energy … Continue reading Giving up – or not?
Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
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”
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
Deploying with Capistrano
At the end of April, I wrote about how automatic rsyncs were making my operations life a living hell. Enter Summer, vacation, new developer and here we are mid-September before I finally get around to permanently fixing this problem. But, I can't really blame all of it on life - after Matthias gave me a … Continue reading Deploying with Capistrano
“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
Migrating to Google Custom Search
"Do what you do best, and link to the rest." - Jeff Jarvis Our search has been suffering for the past year. Decreased usage and miserable performance had combined to make it a wasteland of vain suppositions which alienated our users. Enter Google Custom Search. The Users Have Spoken (and we're listening) We were averaging … Continue reading Migrating to Google Custom Search
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
Would you like fries with that?
Recently, we got a new developer at NetDoktor. It's strange but exciting that I finally have a colleague to work with again, a fellow developer to bounce ideas off of, a buddy for pair programming and a sparring partner for test driven development. I'm pretty psyched. Though long overdue (we've been searching since April), the … Continue reading Would you like fries with that?
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
