http://www.technojunk.net manish shah's weblog Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:06:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Our friend Lars invited us to Oslo this weekend to run a session for Miles on "Scaling Agile". It is generally accepted now that agile methods work very well in these sorts of circumstances: Small project Co-located team On-site customer T&M or internally funded Greenfield systems development Unfortunately, we rarely get to work on projects like ... http://www.technojunk.net/2008/04/28/scaling-agile-in-norway/ A colleague Rob discovered Google Coop - those clever folks at Google now let you create your own private search engine, restricted to search your own set of sites. We created a search engine for our project, and loaded it up with all the Javadocs, HowTos, reference documentation and examples ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/12/27/the-most-useful-tool-of-2006/ Ivan Moore's session on agile estimation and tracking had some interesting discussion centred around the idea of using real-day estimates for iteration planning in conjunction with ideal-day estimates for release planning. For me, this is one of the areas of agile that needs simplification. I always have problems getting people ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/12/27/xpday2006-are-we-done-yet/ Joshua Kerievsky's Keynote was all about selling, namely selling the benefits of agile to large organisations. He made some interesting points, which I've captured here: Coaching can be repetitive and exhausing when you try to scale it up to multiple teams. There's also issues with inconsistency and quality as different coaches ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/12/27/xpday2006-the-selling-game/ In Lasse Koskela's workshop entitled Resistance as a Resource, we played a game which explored the concept of effectively dealing with resistance. You need a group of people, four sets of coloured cards and some markers. The coloured cards each represent one of: A move consists of taking an appropriate colour ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/12/27/xpday2006-resistance-as-a-resource/ I had fun at XPDay this year. It felt less "extreme" than in previous years, as people seemed to focus on pragmatic advice and techniques rather than evangelism. One of my favourite sessions was Dan and Joe's Awesome Acceptance Testing. They identified 5 aspects to any acceptance testing regime: Automation - the ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/12/05/awesome-acceptance-testing/ On a recent trip to Rhodes, I finally got a chance to experiment with the Depth of Field settings on the 350D. Here's a shot of Rhodes Old Town (a world-heritage site) with a reasonably high depth of field, so that as much of the image as possible is in focus. ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/11/19/depth-of-field/ Thomas and I will be presenting our session "Against All Odds" at XP Day 2006 on November 28th. It's an experience report on Agile Transition, where we will mainly be talking about: Legacy Technology Fixed Price Contracts Offsite-customers Product Development If we ever figure out how to cram that lot into our 30 minute slot, ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/11/19/presenting-at-xpday/ A good practice in any project is to showcase working software to your stakeholders every iteration. It's even more important when developing a product, as the feedback and discussion on the features you have implemented really does drive out what to implement next. Recently we were looking around for a tool ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/11/19/winking-excellent/ As my project has been doing some Ajax work recently, we've been looking around for a good way of acceptance testing our Ajax components. Being an agile project, we break our requirements up into stories and write an acceptance test for each story. The acceptance test verifies that the acceptance ... http://www.technojunk.net/2006/11/01/automated-testing-for-ajax-applications-part-i/