So far, I’ve talked about how I went for Introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team as well as User Stories – Making Sure Your Customers Get The First-class Seats. While User Stories are a good start, enforcing ruthless prioritization of these stories can really streamline your development processes. Priorities get mixed up [...]
July 2008
Have you ever found yourself in Sprint 4 or 5 without a single release under your belt? Is it because the new functionality involves a big database upgrade or depends upon coordinating three or four different departments? Not only does this kill motivation, but it’s extremely risky to push out this mountain of code and [...]
In my last post about Introducing Agile Practices to Manage a Remote Development Team I described the issues we faced with our existing development process and provided a step-by-step overview of the agile practices we implemented. In this post, I want to introduce you to the concept of User Stories and how you can use [...]
Let’s face it, compared to other engineering disciplines software development is just coming out of the stone age. Heck, I’m sure I’ll get a lot of flak for even suggesting that software development is an engineering discipline (though I have to admit the way a lot of developers go about their work, calling it engineering [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
