What would you say if I told you that you can double multiply the output of your development team while simultaneously increasing quality? Let me show you how I made this happen in a small team a couple of months ago. When I joined autoplenum.de in October 2007, roughly 10 months after its founding, "phase … Continue reading Introducing Agile Practices to Manage a Remote Development Team Series
What Developers Want
Developers are people too. Believe it or not, they have needs and wants just like everyone else. Here are some, which the Operations department should be able to satisfy for a more harmonious and productive workplace. Robust development environment Just as sysadmins have those black sheep servers in the back of the server room used … Continue reading What Developers Want
6 Bad Ways of Conveying Urgent Tasks (And How to Fight Them)
Sometimes, due to the high urgency of issues, the owners of tasks are not patient enough to use your standardized way of filing a ticket in your issue tracking system. Instead, they resort to various ways of conveying the new task to you or your team, disrupting your seamless ticket flow. Here's a list of … Continue reading 6 Bad Ways of Conveying Urgent Tasks (And How to Fight Them)
Continuous Integration Helps Find and Kill Bugs
Today, automated test builds are a goal of most development shops, and Martin Fowler's article on Continuous Integration provides an excellent overview about the major aspects. Regardless of where your team is on the path to achieving this goal, here are a few hints how to ease your way. The committer pulls test coverage out … Continue reading Continuous Integration Helps Find and Kill Bugs
The Importance Of Having Seamless Ticket Flow
I don’t know about you, but I want to organize my day's work as it suits me. Sure, there are the inescapable meetings, which block part of your day, but the rest of it (hopefully most of it) should be under your own control. Issue Tracking as Pull System To enable developers and sysadmins to … Continue reading The Importance Of Having Seamless Ticket Flow
How Leasing Can Improve Cash Flow and Uptime
If your company is strapped for cash, buying a new file server for $10K is a lot of money. But you might not have to shell it out all at once if you consider leasing or cloud computing. Although you ultimately end up paying more, going in front of the board and explaining an extra … Continue reading How Leasing Can Improve Cash Flow and Uptime
The trouble with using an empty development database
Imagine yourself building a new web application from the ground up. Let's say - an online bookshelf where you want to keep track of all the books you own. Along with the first lines of code you setup your basic database schema (You really need a database, right?) and you even come up with some … Continue reading The trouble with using an empty development database
Ownership Takes Commitment
Building on my previous article "The Branch Not Taken", I'd like to convince you of the importance of code ownership. In Garret Hardin's essay "Tragedy of the Commons", he describes the burden that communal freedoms place upon a finite resource. Protecting your release branch If you consider stable, production ready code as a finite resource, … Continue reading Ownership Takes Commitment
The “It runs on my box” syndrome
You've heard it before, right? The standard answer given by so many developers when faced with a broken feature on the test server: “…but it runs on my box…”. Oh yeah, one of my favorites. You're supposed to get this released and they can only come up with this lame excuse. Why does every developer … Continue reading The “It runs on my box” syndrome
The Branch Not Taken
Whether you're running your website from the trunk or a release branch, you've already taken the first important step - you're using a source code repository. Depending upon the size of your team and website, the way you manage this repository will vary tremendously. I'd like to share some of my experiences in managing code … Continue reading The Branch Not Taken
