Archive for July, 2008
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
My pictures from the Bugaboos are now online in my climbing web site's picture gallery. There's also a short write-up of the trip.
We got quite a lot done and I'm back just in time to go to Toronto next week for Agile 2008, which promises to be a blast. I'm ...
Tags: Events, Travel
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Another addition to the Scrum Bestiary. So we all know about Scrum’s pigs and chickens and a while back I wrote about seagulls. What about cows?
The big difference is that cows give milk, they will contribute to the team if asked. Chickens and seagulls never contribute they just get in ...
Tags: agile, Scrum
1 Comment »
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Playing music in your team room? Who gets to pick it and for how long? Here's the "rules" we use in the patterns & practices team rooms:
Music rotates each hour
Everyone gets an hour to play the music they want
At the end of the hour someone else gets the next hour
At ...
Tags: agile, Proven practices
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Alistair Cockburn (pronounced co-burn) maintains that software development is a cooperative game.
Others have described software development as exactly the opposite, a game where the participants do not cooperate - see Analyzing Software Development as a Noncooperative Game (pdf).
I think I'm with Alistair on this one while the alternative point of ...
Tags: agile, Metaphors
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Monday, July 21st, 2008
Ever discovered people on your team have gotten into the habit of writing slow unit tests? Tests that take half a minute to execute, that bog down both your development and your build server?
With xUnit.net you can extend the Fact attribute to set the test timeout. In the example below ...
Tags: TDD, xUnit
1 Comment »
Friday, July 18th, 2008
A couple more sources someone pointed me to on distributed agile. Worth a read but for the lazy I've summarized some key points here: Elastic Path uses Distributed Agile and Outsourcing to Stay on Top in Fast-Paced E-Commerce Software Choose a vendor with experience in ...
Tags: agile, Distributed teams
1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
Dates for p&p Summit 2008 have been announced: November 3rd to 7th 2008. Lots of exciting speakers like Kent Beck will be there for you and some not so exciting ones... like me.
Apparently I'm speaking. How do I know? Well my name appears on the presenters page along with a ...
Tags: Events, Microsoft, p&p, Seattle
2 Comments »
Monday, July 14th, 2008
So I'm on vacation but the blog posts will keep on trundling along. This leaves the somewhat strange possibility that I died in a horrible auto wreck with a moose on the Trans-Canada Highway (not to be confused with the Trans-Canadian Water Slide). But to all intents I'm still alive ...
Tags: Travel, Trivia
2 Comments »
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
I'm actually starting work on a couple of white papers around how p&p runs its software development teams and some of the best practices we've harvested from looking at other Microsoft teams. Currently I'm thinking of two main topics; large scale projects and distributed teams. Some of this will appear ...
Tags: agile, Microsoft, p&p, Proven practices, Scrum
6 Comments »
Monday, July 7th, 2008
The p&p Composite Applications team has just released Composite Application Guidance for WPF. In a nutshell...
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications—composite applications ...
Tags: Events, Microsoft, p&p
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