December 2008

Setting Up A Secure Subversion Source Code Repository

by Dan Ackerson on December 28, 2008 · 10 comments

Our source code repository is currently hosted at the offshore development site and there is no external access to it (neither through the Internet nor a VPN). While this is certainly desirable from a security standpoint, I’d really love to see what the developers are actually working on. I asked the director there to put [...]

Recession Spells Doom for Gantt Charts

by Dan Ackerson on December 21, 2008 · 0 comments

This week I had the pleasure of seeing an actual, honest-to-goodness Gantt chart clutched in our boss’s emphatically gesticulating hand. I actually did a double take to verify what I was seeing and shook my head in disbelief. OK, so we’ve quite a way to go before we’ll be able to call ourselves agile. But, [...]

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 [...]

Static Backlogs, Delivery Dates and “Done”

by Dan Ackerson on December 14, 2008 · 0 comments

Getting to know our product manager over the last couple weeks, I got the impression he was a bit overwhelmed with all the favors, bugs and feature requests he was faced with every day. So, I asked him where he maintained all these different things and he pulled up a spreadsheet. When I asked him [...]

Synergy Map: How To Map Out Your Current Strategy (Part 2 of 2)

by Matthias Marschall on December 11, 2008 · 2 comments

In the first part of my how to map your current strategy using a synergy map, I showed you how to position your projects on a synergy map and how to add size, completion and feelings to it. In this post, I want to show you how to find synergies and conflicts between your goals [...]

New Job at NetDoktor

by Dan Ackerson on December 7, 2008 · 4 comments

On Monday, I started my new job as CTO of NetDoktor.de GmbH. Its the #1 health portal over here in Germany (ala WebMD or Revolution Health in the States). One of my main tasks will be to bring a more agile approach to their software development. As they currently outsource the website development, I once [...]

Are you sometimes overwhelmed by all the stuff going on in parallel? Especially when dealing with web operations, urgent tasks can blur your view on what’s really important. In my last post about how to stop being busy and get productive instead, I showed a quick way of reconnecting with your goals. In this article, [...]